This September the CultureShake project team travelled to the English School in Gothenburg, Sweden, to attend the third and final workshop week with our German and Swedish CultureShake students. The multilingual students worked hard on trialling the Shakespeare peer teaching activities they had developed over the course of the last 18 months. Although the students hadn’t seen each other since the last workshop in Stratford in September 2017 they set to work immediately, preparing classes for students as young as Year 2 as well as older students at a nearby Sixth Form College on one of the many islands around Gothenburg.
It was great to see the students’ work come to fruition, and how much the English School in Gothenburg has embraced teaching Shakespeare to all their year groups with the help of our online teaching resources since the start of the project in 2016. This workshop week was not only an integral step in our Erasmus+ funded learning project, but also officially part of the European Year of Cultural Heritage in 2018.
The aim of the European Year of Cultural Heritage is to encourage more people to discover and engage with Europe's cultural heritage, and to reinforce a sense of belonging to a common European space. The slogan for the year is “Our heritage: where the past meets the future”, which is very apt for our EU-funded learning project that concentrates on integrating multilingualism in how we learn about shared cultural heritage.
We are very honoured to be part of a campaign that unites more than 10,000 events in 36 countries and to raise visibility on a European level for our education outreach programmes.