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"CONTEXT: Museums contain the most precious accumulations of human societies, all over the world. According to the last definition adopted by ICOM (2007, Vienna), ""a museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment"". Although nowadays education occupies the first position in the enumeration of the purposes a museum serves, it has not always been this way. It has only at the beginning of the new millennium that education was officially added among the museum roles. Thus, museums have been recognized as non-formal education providers, having the role to transmit culture and thus educate people, serving as platforms wherefrom knowledge is being absorbed. Museums are cultural repositories where people can find inspiration, delight, where they can feel intrigued, curious, and where people interact, or need to interact with the exhibit. In most cases, this interaction requires mediation, involves the understanding of the other, of the visitor's perspective, which is with very few exception totally different from the one of the specialist, of the insider. There are some university departments which include Museum Studies in their offer. Yet, this is not a common situation. A more frequent case is the one where history, art history, or art pedagogy departments contain in their curriculum museology courses. At undergraduate level, though, the situation is even more critical as there are no such courses included in the curricula of tourism high chools. OBJECTIVES: The SSaNeProMM project promotes cooperation and exchange of good practices in the field of VET with the purpose of building a more inclusive society. Both IVET and CVET are considered in this partnership based on the complementarity between formal and non-formal education and on the societal need of vocational training in museums. The project is also meant to build bridges between the theoretical educational class and the on-the-job training specific to the museum work, thus leading to a reconsideration of the daily practices in the vocational training. To allow the development of their audiences, museums should engage in a dialogue with such audiences. This project aims at creating the premises for facilitating this sort of dialogue in the future, of providing tomorrow's museum specialists with the necessary mediation skills. In short, the project aims at producing a job description of the museum mediator, and at training people for providing them with the necessary skills. RESULTS: SSaNeProMM will provide museum staff and trainees in the process of shaping their vocational educational background with the tools necessary to achieve intercultural behavior and communication. The project will thus contribute to preparing today's museum mediators, anchored in the reality of the society, able to adapt to the multiple challenges that can be brought by the museum visitors, irrespective of their national origin, sex, profession, religion etc. Trainers and trainees will have the opportunity of reflecting on the importance of the own culture in a globalizing world, of communicating it correctly, understanding and respecting the expectation of the other. Culture is an identity mark but it has the power to connect people, to bring people together, to share information and knowledge, and attenuate cultural and societal divide. It attempts to raise awareness among museum professionals as for the significance of reflecting our own cultural identities and act as a catalyst, as a vehicle for mutual understanding, mediating the museum to the eyes and mind of the visitors. In this framework, the project will provide vocational training for prospective future museum specialists - the museum mediators - and for the museum staff, in order to exchange knowledge, experiences, to learn how to adapt to the others' expectations. IMPACT: The impact of the project will be identifiable at three levels: in the short-term, museum staff will be better trained (CVET, prepared to respond to the visitor's needs, to identify differences and act accordingly. In the medium-term, the museum will have the opportunity of selecting its staff from within a pool of ICVET trained young people, while in the long-term, museums will become organizations much better connected to the community in which it evolves. The exchange of experience is an educational model that uses the power that has to the human mind the concept of lived thing/ activity, as opposed to the mere theoretical concept. Therefore, this project is a hands-on, work-based exchange of good practices, as outlined in the activity of cultural organizations and training providers from five countries (RO, IT, SP, GR). It capitalizes learned lessons and turns them into taught concepts."
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