The UNESCO Chair on Cultural Policies has received a grant from the University of Girona for a project to create an Association of Culture and Development Professionals in Cartagena de Indias.
For the past five years, the UNESCO Chair on Cultural Policies has been collaborating with the Technological University of Bolivar to offer a Master’s in Culture and Development programme in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia).

The aim of the Master's degree is to equip professionals with the analytical and conceptual skills they need to come up with proposals that will contribute to the human development of countries, regions and towns, through their involvement in policy design and decision-taking projects in the public and private sectors that link, with an interdisciplinary vision, culture as a means and an end of development.

In the past five years a number of professionals have been trained in cultural management who need to find a connection point that will enable them to share their knowledge, activities and resources in order to promote and lend weight to their professional activity.

The associative sector is perhaps an important point of reference for this, but because there is not a significant tradition of developing the associative fabric in Colombia - unlike in our country - there is a lack of knowledge of how it works and its advantages.

Thanks to the grant received in the call for applications for Grants for International Cooperation Projects for Development given by the University of Girona, the UNESCO Chair on Cultural Policies and the Technological University of Bolivar are proposing the promotion of an association of culture and development professionals among the holders of this Master's degree in Cartagena de Indias.

The UNESCO Chair is collaborating at two levels: the first, educational and the other, technical advice. The aim is to make known the experience of the associative fabrics of other places in the world, the benefits of creating an association and its purpose as well as to help them create an association with the technical advice given.

This project is scheduled to run from July to November 2015.

Banyoles Town Council's Education Service, the Unesco Chair of Cultural Policies and Cooperation at the UdG, Conarte Internacional and PDA: Petits Dibuixos Animats (short animations) are working together to develop the project "Equal and different. Talking about the imagination and creativity".

With this project, the UNESCO Chair gives continuity to the work started with PDA Films (the result of which will be the project «Te cuento»), which aims to strengthen and spread these kinds of interventions which, through links between education and culture, allow children to express themselves through the language of cinematographic animation.

The project is carried out at the Escola Can Puig de Banyoles with the participation of a total of 21 primary school children from three different schools in the town. Within the framework of the PDA methodology, the project involves holding 6 three-hour long workshop sessions over a period of three weekends. Through this project, the participating children, with the direction of PDA, work together to produce an animation.

This project enjoys the collaboration of L'Obra Social La Caixa (Art for social improvement) and Banyoles Town Council.

Friday 19 September 2014 at 7.30 pm sees the presentation in the Auditorium of the Cultural Association - CMEM of Banyoles of the short PDA animation produced within the framework of the project "Equal and different. Talking about the imagination and creativity"

It is about a robot in the shape of a vacuum cleaner who sucks the imagination from the children and its confrontation with a kind of hero in the form of a fish tank.

The Unesco Chair of Cultural Policies and Cooperation at the UdG and ConArte Mexico signed a collaboration agreement in 2004 which has enabled them to work together on different education and training projects for children and young people through the arts all over the world.

In Mexico, ConArte has managed to incorporate the arts as an axis for education for peace and social development in state schools and highly marginalised communities. It has created methodologies that make a work of high quality and ownership possible. This NGO in Mexico has received the international recognition of UNICEF, OEA and OEI, among others.

The experience of Mexico and the results obtained by different cooperation projects show us that the educational capacity of the arts and cultural heritage are today more necessary than ever. Isolating the arts and heritage from education and development has led to serious consequences: limitations in learning, social and aesthetic exclusion, marginalisation, a lack of audiences in many disciplines and infrastructures.

In Spain, Catalonia and in Girona, there are already many artists, creators, teachers and cultural agents who are promoting innovative initiatives and who wish to pursue this path. These experiences have laid bare the need to seriously consider arts education and education in cultural heritage as a fundamental ingredient of the education of children, young people and citizens in the 21st century.

From Mexico and in alliance with the Unesco Chair on Cultural Policies and Cooperation at the University of Girona, the Torroella de Montgrí music school and Festival of Music, and the Festival Temporada Alta, progress is being made in creating ConArte Internacional, as an autonomous general interest association, for pooling efforts and moving forward from local experiences in international projects.

What does ConArte Internacional do?

• It puts the educational world in dialogue with the world of artistic creation and the cultural offering.
• It educates with and through the arts and culture.
• It trains audiences and citizens, creators and critical consumers of the arts and culture.
• It promotes the participation of the artistic and cultural world in solidarity projects, social cohesion and cooperation for development projects that incorporate education, the arts and culture.
• It trains trainers in the methodologies created by ConArte Mexico and others that have been developed in other countries.
• It promotes the education of the artistic sector in subjects like entrepreneurship and sustainable development.

How does it do it?

In Girona city, in neighbouring towns and districts like Salt, there are a great many high quality opportunities to work with the arts and artists, due to the large number of cultural projects that are up and running and due to the needs and social changes resulting from growing migration and educational and social integration needs.

Music festivals, performing arts, film, etc. mean the constant presence of creators and national and international shows. The vibrancy of music and dance schools, creation centres, cultural and educational companies and projects makes the province of Girona a laboratory of creativity and the perfect framework for these kinds of projects.

ConArte Internacional works to learn from these experiences and to promote the educational and social cohesion capacity of this creativity:

1. Bringing the arts and artists closer to the educational world and to the projects that already work
2.  Promoting the development and social cohesion potential of the arts and culture
3.  Promoting a permanent laboratory or shared space for reflection and training.

http://conarteinternacional.net/

«Learning from practical experiences. Culture and development» it is a project promoted by the Unesco Chair of Cultural Policies and Cooperation of the University of Girona and the Universidad Tecnológica Bolívar, at the request of Fondo para el logro de los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio (F-ODM).

Thanks to the experiences resulting from the practicum of the Ventana de Cultura y Desarrollo del F-ODM and the conceptual and theoretical contributions in this field, it has been possible to compile the questions that are key for the management of development projects with a cultural approach.

The methodology used for the systematisation of experiences, based on social sciences techniques and approached from a research-action perspective, has been named Applied Practical Learnings (APL). The singularity of this proposal is the promotion and awareness raising of the learning on the part of those taking part in the project, fostering the exploitation of the practicals and generating knowledge for the area itself.

The experience resulting from the research is transferred to digital applications which are made available on the project web page.

The aim of these applications is to facilitate a process of project management skill building and to promote the effectiveness and sustainability of development initiatives with a cultural approach.

«Te cuento» is an education project for diversity and development promoted by the Unesco Chair of Cultural Policies and Cooperation at the University of Girona and PDA-Films (Pequeños Dibujos Animados), with the support of theAgencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo.

«Te cuento» is an educational resource designed to enable children, young people and adults to delve into education for cultural diversity and development through film. The use of film, and audiovisual languages in general, as an educational resource is becoming increasingly popular with teachers, educators and students, as it transmits knowledge at all levels.

This is an innovative, suggestive and high quality arts project composed of three short animations produced by children from three different countries in which the protagonists talk about their local environment, their day to day life and how their cultural identity is constructed, and reflect on human rights and the idea of solidarity and cooperation. The three films are accompanied by educational resources that offer multiple ways of working on values and reading images.

The films:

The three films are available at http://www.te-cuento.net

Educational proposal:

The use of film as an educational resource is becoming ever more popular with teachers, educators and students because it transmits knowledge at all levels: it enables us to look at content and languages. The subjects which we propose working on through these three films are simply an idea, and it is up to the people who use the materials to adapt them to their own realities, contexts, audiences and educational needs. We offer a possible way of working through the material but always leaving it open to personalisation and bringing in other topics and themes.

Our proposal entails, on the one hand, analysing what these three short films tell us, and on the other hand, how they tell it.

Addressees:

• Children and young people from nine years of age.
• Educators, primary-school teachers, teachers, social and cultural agents and agents working in cooperation for development.

Competences:

• Cultural and artistic skills
• Social and civic skills
• Communication skills

Goals:

• Learning to know other cultural realities and respecting the cultural diversity.
• Knowing the fundamental and universal human rights, mainly the ones of the children.
• Learning that the solidarity is a human characteristic and a first step towards the personal implication and the collective cooperation in the defence of the fundamental human rights of all citizens of the world.
• Learning to appraise and to interpret artistic and creative expressions.
• Learning to communicate learnings and critical reflections.

Click here to unload the Didactic Guide.

Between March 2009 and June 2010, the UNESCO Chair On Cultural Policies and Cooperation at the University of Girona, together with the Interart Foundation, took part in the project «Informative and Educational Kit on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions for Spanish speaking students in secondary school» at the request of UNESCO’s Division of Cultural Expressions and the Creative Industries. The project is part of the implementation of article 10 of the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, relating to education and raising public awareness, and is supported byAgencia Española de Cooperación Internacional al Desarrollo (AECID).

The result of this order has been the elaboration, the design and the production of a pedagogic tool about the principles and values of this Convention.

Presentation of «Diversidades, el juego de la creatividad»

«Diversidades, el juego de la creatividad» it is an “educational kit” aimed at primary school teachers and educators, in its first edition, and at young people aged between 12 and 16 years, as the last group with which the content can be worked in an amusing, but nonetheless rigorous, way:

• The diversity of practicals, productions and cultural consumptions that configure its own identity
• The substratum of the creativity, individual and collective, that characterises them and makes them possible
• The right to some cultural policies that allow to maintain them and to encourage them
• The need of policies of cultural cooperation that, as an exercise of solidarity, guarantee the equality of opportunities in all countries and communities and favour the sustainability of the cultural world system.

The group in what goes directed places its way to be and to be, managing the diversity of options and cultural expressions that surround them and contribute to defining them, in the stage of the pre-adolescence and/or adolescence, a stage of identification and construction of the identity itself, in which the young people are discovering and moldejant. For this motive, Diversidades commits itself to a pedagogic strategy that involves the young people in first person. Following the observation of the diversity of the individuality itself, of the I, the game advances towards the recognition of the next social group, the US. The following step is simple and gradual. When is part of a group, the otherness turns up in an immediate way, that is, the OTHER one or the OTHER groups. Of the sum of them all, the concept is deduced from ALL OF THEM and layer to the universal is advanced, since the diversity is what the same existence of all of them makes possible.

«Diversidades» conceives like a game and a collaborative space where educators, primary-school teachers and young people find a proposal innovative of use of the digital technologies for even educational. The contents and the format of «Diversidades» convert this tool into a very adaptable educational resource to different curricula school and in different formats and time. «Diversidades» it is presented in two formats: CD-ROM and on paper.

The project

The preparation, design and production of this educational tool have presented the UNESCO Chair of Cultural Policies and Cooperation with an important challenge and an excellent opportunity to develop one of the Chair's lines of research, the one studying the relationship between education and culture.

During the process of conceptualisation of Diversidades, the cultural education with young people and the cultural diversity, were worked together with a group of experts at international level about the Convention. Through varying meetings and meetings they kept on being structured which subjects the treaties had to be and which methodology the most appropriate.

At level of development of the pedagogic tool, a collaboration with a group of investigators of the Pompeu Fabra University, specialists in digital technologies and its application in the world of the education, was established. This alliance has been crucial to be able to develop an innovative product, at the same time than one pass for its functioning autonomous and adaptable to a great variety of situations and realities.

Once designed, «Diversidades» it was supposed to be put into practice and an open and thorough dialogue opened with the educational sector, including both teachers and students, to appraise the feasibility and perception of this educational tool. Some pilot tests were carried out to this end in March 2010 in secondary schools in Olot (Catalonia), Santo Domingo (República Dominicana) and Ciudad de Guatemala (Guatemala).

These pilot tests were to confirm the efficiency and good reception of «Diversidades», and to identify some aspects to improve, which would be addressed in the final phase of the project. At the same time, these experiences and the participation of the Chair in congresses, courses and international seminars have been also for carrying out some institutional meetings of presentation of the project and identifying possible ways of implementation of the kit from the moment of its publication. The generated expectancy has exceeded abundantly what was waited for.

«Diversidades» it has been officially delivered to UNESCO’s Division of Cultural Expressions and the Creative Industries, which is disseminating it at international level from all the Permanent Delegations and National Commissions, as well as in the convention's focal points in Spain and Latin America. Diversidades is a pedagogic tool accessible to everybody who will be able to unload from Internet.

South Africa is a young democracy: almost 40% of its population has between 14 and 35 years of age. The young South Africans have always played a wholemeal and powerful role in the education of the society and they were crucial from the modern revolution of South Africa in 1976. The young South Africans have today a huge responsibility in the development of its country, as it is indicated in the National Policy of Youth (NYP) 2009-2014.

The young people of South Africa are, undoubtedly, capable of satisfying these huge expectations. However, and in particular the deprived young people, the catalysts of the development of the country are confronted with huge obstacles to achieve its full potential and being. The unemployment, the HIV / SIDA, the crime, the family responsibilities and the access limited to the services of information and of leisure are some of the obstacles that they confront, which limits its social participation and civic commitment and exacerbates the poverty in its communities.

Taking part in the art and to develop the expression they promote in the young people a major cohesion and social participation. Its perspective and experience give more importance to the reduction in the poverty, which makes the established objectives be every time more relevant.

The young people are the motive of this project. A group of four organisations of South Africa and Spain, with the support of the European Commission, the challenge of arriving at 2,000 vulnerable young people and giving them accepted to be able through the improvement of its skills to the life, to take part in its communities and to contribute positively to the development of its communities through the arts and the culture.

«Las Américas» it is an exhibition based on the graphic materials of the agency EFE and of other specialised archives in the Latin American area, and is designed to be a visual chronicle of the contribution of women in the area of the construction of America and in the

recognition of the fundamental rights. You give them as protagonists and as a conductive line of the story of the exhibition.

Comissariada by Alfons Martinell, director of the UNESCO Chair, the exhibition will allow to know individual persons, social and collective facts, images of the daily and social life, historical facts, conflicts and representative social and artistic movements of the last 100 years.

«Las Américas» it is not intended as a historical exhibition, but as a chronicle which, by means of images, illustrates the role of women in the evolution of society in line with the advances in the recognition of fundamental rights. The image and the photojournalism have an own language that shows with a special vitality the daily life and concrete situations, helping us to understand realities not very known or that are far from our perceptions.

As an argumental thread, the exhibition starts from the contents of the International Pact of Social and Cultural Economic Rights (DESC). Approved in 1966, they join in a very clear way the principles of the face of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights, developed more precisely in the 4th World Lecture of Pekín 1995. This frame of reference allows us to relate the figures and historical facts with some principles that the international community has accepted as an expression of the social and political advance and the consideration of the universal rights. The exhibition proposes a reflection on the state of consolidation of the fundamental rights from the contribution that the graphic work has made, and is making, if shows the citizenship the symbolic representations of these facts.

The exhibition is not intended as a historical study about the situation of women on the continent, «Las Américas» but rather it incorporates the image of women as a key component of this modernity. The majority anonymous women who contribute are to the democratic consolidation of its country, that they fight in the everyday life, that they work in the society that has touched them to him to live with plenitude, that they are present in its environment in many ways and that ask for a fair deal as components of its citizenship and that, in short, have fought for the rights of all.

The sample is the result of the fruit of exchanges and works of different expert carried out simultaneously in Spain, Colombia, Uruguay and Mexico, establishing a dialogue, in what the visions will be brought that the exhibition provoke in the Uruguayan viewers and that will be accumulating the approaches that are produced root of the future itinerant for Latin America. Put also the work of documentation carried out by photographers, chroniclers, historians, centres of information and documentation, archives of images, etc, data bases, film libraries, in value... The exhibition has equally an interactive virtual space like one element more of the explanatory speech.