Cultural Heritage in Education through expressive arts, museums, and digital applications

Heritage education and arts in education have enhanced the learning process multiple times and their paths are successfully crossed in this edited volume. Living and being active members of today’s society implies acknowledging the importance of the past and imposes optimising Cultural Heritage as a fundamental source of knowledge and information, and as an invaluable tool for cultivating respect among different cultures and identities. The aim of this edited volume is to explore multiple applications of Heritage Education,
and various methodological approaches of Heritage in local, regional, or international educational contexts. According to the European Commission (2014), the core idea of Heritage Education is to offer opportunities to participate in experiences, to be engaged with new concepts, and acquire new skills. By exploring tangible and intangible heritage assets, learners gain knowledge, intellectual skills, and a wider range of competences on issues such as cultural heritage maintenance or societal well-being. Learners also have the opportunity to understand holistically their own cultures from the past and know
how past heritage has developed and transformed alongside history, bringing the past to the present (Delgado-Algarra and Cuenca-Lopez 2020). The exploration of heritage and citizenship together has been advocated by the Council of Europe (Copeland 2006) and it has been suggested that the development of Heritage Education is of paramount importance for the school curriculum and should be applied in different subject areas; every citizen should be free to participate in cultural life, as enshrined in the Faro Convention (Casonato et al. 2022).