Edinburgh College Signs Exciting New Partnership With Institutions From Across Europe
Edinburgh College has officially signed an exciting new partnership with four European UNESCO Cities as part of a new project to improve literacy rates and preserve and enrich cultural heritage through a variety of creative mediums.
Edinburgh College’s Creative Industries faculty has entered the three-year partnership with Nottingham, Leeuwarden (Holland) & Ljubljana (Slovenia), which is funded through the EU’s Erasmus+ programme, to work on the Story Valley project.
The Story Valley project will run from November 2020 to August 2023 and will use oral history as a driver for preserving cultural heritage and enriching it with diversity and the heritage of other cultures by combining the areas of literacy development, oral history and creative expression.
Story Valley is an inclusive project which aims to stimulate intercultural dialogue and mutual understanding by fostering exchange which raises awareness of the importance of cultural heritage, how it shaped the present and how it can shape the future.
As part of the project, students from Edinburgh College, including those from migrant backgrounds, will explore their own and each other’s oral history, language and literacy in an engaging and creative way.
Edinburgh’s local creative partners include the City of Edinburgh Council, the Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh International Book Festival, The Scottish Poetry Library and UNESCO City of Literature.
The project will promote creative thinking and aims to target and improve students’ language and literacy skills through an innovative process of peer and interdisciplinary learning by combining fields that are traditionally taught separately (language, literacy and literature with media, art and drama).
Edinburgh College head of faculty for Creative Industries Jakki Jeffery said: “The Creative Industries faculty is delighted to be part of this very exciting project that sees our teams working with a range of local, National and European partners. The three-year project will allow both staff and students the opportunity to learn about each other’s cultural heritage and find a variety of different mediums to share that more widely with our communities.
“We are striving forward in keeping our creative cultural partnerships open and growing, overcoming the uncertainty which we have all lived through this year. We look forward to seeing the realisation of all the creative cultural outputs and the legacy that this project will leave behind for future generations.”
For more information on the project, visit the Learning Hib Friesland website.
