MyHandScraft: mapping migrant and local handcrafters’ skills to develop a tailored educational programme
As a first step towards the design of a tailored e-educational programme able to encourage cultural and skills exchange between migrant and local handcrafters, the five partners of the MyHandScraft project (CESIE, Dacorum Council for Voluntary Service, GrantXpert Consulting, Active Citizens Partnership, Social innovation Fund) carried out a field study research in all the implementation countries.
A total of 250 people were hence interviewed in Italy, UK, Cyprus, Greece and Lithuania (25 migrant plus 25 local handcrafters in each country), through the administration of 2 different surveys respectively aimed at identifying migrants’ needs, and migrant and local handcrafters’ existing skills and skill shortages.
The results of the survey allowed to get an insight into existing differences and commonalities among handicraft traditions across partner countries, generally highlighting the will by both target groups to learn new handicraft skills and to exchange techniques proper of different cultures as a way to enrich and enhance the handicraft sector.
The results of the research underlined the potential of handicraft and cultural heritage as tools to foster the intercultural exchange and understanding, and they are currently being processed in a Field study research state of the art report, which shall be soon made available in English and in all partner languages.
The project consortium, which has recently met for the second project meeting in Nicosia, Cyprus, on September 5th and 6th in order to discuss the current progress of the project, will build on the results collected in order to design and deliver an innovative E-Educational Programme which shall be made available on the project E-learning platform (http://myhandscraft.eu/) together with all other project outputs.
The 3 training packages composing the programme will be implemented at local level next year through a series of 13 local workshops involving both migrant and local handcrafters, and they will deal with a set of topics ranging from the enhancement of basic skills and key competences for intangible heritage transmission to the facilitation of the exchange of skills related to handicraft between local and migrant handcrafters, and the promotion of handicraft-based entrepreneurial initiatives.