The Cultural Heritage to improve skills and to create a bridge between school and museum

Cultural heritage education can provide information in different fields due to different ways one can use to approach them, depending on the context: given its nature, it can in fact represent both object of study, meaning and aim. This means that cultural heritage allows for a multidisciplinary approach, being related to several aspects of human life. This is a fundamental feature when it is employed in the school environment. Starting from these assumptions, we present the project Observing artwork as a form of education for learning and citizenship, started in the school year 2015/2016. This project has proposed a practice allowing for the use of cultural heritage within classrooms as a multidisciplinary learning tool, by means of the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) method. VTS focus on the learner, placing him at the centre of the learning process. The student, by means of his knowledge and experiences, constructs the meaning of image represented by an artwork, cooperating with his classmates, aiming at learning to learn. Hence, it is a method that addresses the needs of the application of the constructivist theory in the learning environment. In order to bring cultural heritage inside classrooms, educational activities are carried out using digital resources, such as visual artworks repositories, and technological devices, like interactive whiteboards displaying pictures employed for the VTS practice.