T-PLACE project aims at designing and developing an inclusive and participatory model of place-based education, focused on the use of cross-media tools (e.g. immersive technologies and extended reality) to promote a participatory approach to cultural heritage and generate a positive fallout on citizenship and tourism.
To fully understand, preserve and promote local identity, tangible and intangible values, landscapes palimpsests, we propose an innovative multi-disciplinary approach of education to the places, ranging from Educational Technology to Geography, Applied Geography and Historical Geography, Geomatics and virtual/hybrid representations of the territory and its assets.
The multidimensional educational model will be designed and tested with a full-range pilot in Sesto Fiorentino involving the municipality, as well as public and private local institutions, to engage the citizenship in training, documenting and exploring activities. At this purpose TPLACE will implement a cross-media classroom, as a permanent asset of the University of Florence, and a mobile app, leveraging on xReality, for the exploration of the territory according to the documentation of the historical assets. T-PLACE will also design and release educational modules to be used in university curricula for teaching activities. Intense and continuous engagement activities will be deployed to disseminate the project’s outcomes and to strengthen the network among the researchers’ community, the citizens and other stakeholders for the replicability of the model.
The project is entirely aligned with the “PNR 2021-2027”, in particular with area “2. Humanistic Culture, Creativity, Social Transformation, Inclusive Society”, fully addressing the Section “2.1.5 Participatory Approach to the Cultural Heritage”.