We are pleased to announce the launch of the “Training for the Contact Zone” (TCZ), an Erasmus+ Adult Education project, running from 1st September 2024 – 31st August 2026. The project aims to raise awareness about the importance and challenges that museums and heritage sites face in reaching and serving a broad and diverse audience. Training is essential to effectively develop and manage new approaches.
TCZ Partner Meeting in Hania (Greece), April 2025
Over the next two years, we will develop and test training materials for heritage sector professionals, artists, cultural mediators, staff, and volunteers. TCZ will conduct training sessions to enhance the skills of cultural mediators and innovate their practices. The main goal is to make heritage institutions more representative of contemporary European societies, promoting a transnational view of history and contributing to greater social inclusion.
Over the past months, the Training for the Contact Zone team has been co-creating a curriculum for the upcoming TCZ trainings. This curriculum is the result of a collaborative process, starting with a needs assessment where all partners shared insights into their local contexts, challenges, and resources. As the next step in this process, TCZ presented for the first time the working draft of the curriculum to an external audience that we refer to as the Community of Practice (CoP).
The TCZ Community of Practice is an open, participatory forum where external cultural workers, educators, artists, activists, and other relevant stakeholders are invited to engage with the TCZ project. In other words, a testing ground that brings in fresh perspectives on TCZ and its outcomes. The Community of Practice organised by H401 brought together participants with diverse, multidisciplinary backgrounds — spanning participatory arts, memory studies, education management, decolonial practice, history, and the mediation and negotiation of conflicts and dialogues.
Follow the project development on:
– The TCZ website: Training for the Contact Zone
– Instagram: training_contactzone
– Facebook: Training for the Contact Zone
Training for the Contact Zone will be realised by:
TCZ project addresses the needs identified by the Heritage Contact Zone (HCZ), an EU-funded project under the European Year of Cultural Heritage (2018 to 2020). One of its final outcomes was the HCZ Toolkit an online handbook, free to access via: HCZ Toolkit.