Walk into any school museum trip and you’ll find the same sight of students shuffling past ancient collectables like it’s a chore. If you’re lucky enough, you may get a few polite nods and some “oh that’s old!” comments, but that’s about it!
Do you really think that when these kids grow up, they will even be remotely interested in working for the protection of cultural heritage?
Not a chance.
And that’s a problem, a big problem, I must say! Conservation of cultural heritage is our responsibility because culture is our identity and belonging that needs new hands to carry it forward.
You really can’t expect young people to care about heritage unless they can feel it, touch it, taste it, remix it, and laugh with it. Immersive, hands-on experiences are needed to get their continued attention into cultural heritage programs. So in this article, I’ll talk about five practical, creative ways to engage school groups in cultural heritage projects.
Why cultural heritage projects matter to students (and to you)
Cultural heritage is based on two aspects:
- Tangible heritage, i.e., the buildings, monuments, artifacts, and landscapes that anchor our past in physical form.
- Intangible heritage, described by UNESCO as “practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, and skills” that communities recognize as part of their identity.
The whole point of cultural heritage is to answer the centuries-old human question, “Who am I and where do I belong?”
Unfortunately, students being shown cultural heritage the traditional way don’t see it as relevant to them because no one connects it to their own identity.
In an ideal world, a kid in Manchester visiting the Science and Industry Museum should come out realizing how their city produced revolutions that changed the world. A museum should connect the past to its personal pride.
Because only when you truly understand your heritage can you fight to protect it. No child who grew up thinking a museum was a school trip obligation would actually care when it is bulldozed for parking lots later.
Heritage projects also make better humans! A study from the University of Leicester’s School of Museum Studies found that students engaged in community heritage programs reported higher empathy!
5 Ways to Engage School Groups in Cultural Heritage Projects
Without further ado, let’s talk about exactly what you must do to engage students or teenagers in cultural heritage projects.
1. Let Students Lead The Story Instead Of Just Listening To It
Too often, school groups visit museums where they are placed in the audience seat. All they have to do is watch and listen. There’s zero engagement.
It is almost impossible for a child to get some kind of attachment to cultural heritage this way. You want to give them ownership, to feel like they are part of the operation process, to actually enjoy it.
Build a small student steering group for your museum visit and discuss with them:
- What aspects of the heritage do they relate the most to?
- What traditions do they think are fading from the community?
- What voices have they not heard enough?
- What part of the culture feels worth saving to them?
Also, step back and give them some authority. Of course, you won’t like the first time when a teen wants to turn an oral history project into a TikTok series. It’s unconventional. It’s bold. But that is exactly what the youth likes!
And even though involving young people with no experience in running a museum sounds skeptical at first, there are many examples of it being successful.
The UK’s Heritage Fund reports that their youth-led heritage projects outperform top-down ones in long-term engagement!
2. Give Them Something To Do With Their Hands, Not Just Their Eyes
You don’t fall in love with culture by reading “This artifact dates to 1789.”
You fall in love when your hands are dusted with flour from an old family recipe, or when there’s clay under your fingernails and you’re praying that the wobbly pot won’t collapse (spoiler alert: it probably will!).
Active engagement with heritage fixates it into memory. Physical touch has been particularly known to hardwire your memory. Give a student an original exhibit in their hand, and there’s no way they won’t have a sense of wonder interacting with it!
Of course, there are artifacts too fragile to touch (we like our mummies intact, thank you very much!), but you can always have 3D replicas for engagement purposes. Scan and print the originals in 3D and let the students play with it.
See this presentation by Tornado Studio’s co-founder, Martin Kostov, on how Tornado Studios make 3D Reconstructions, Animations, Interactives & Tactile Models for its clients:
Modern Tools for Museums: 3D Reconstructions, Animations, Interactives & Tactile Models
Also, make them use their hands as much as possible.
- If it’s pottery, let them feel the wheel wobble and watch the pot collapse
- Hand them a loom and a needle so they can realize how geometric patterns are rooted in culture
- Have them recreate a century-old recipe from the archives
- Send them outside, with sleeves rolled up, to clear a trail or to mend a trembling wall
And you’ve naturally involved kids in maintaining and reviving heritage!
3. Turn oral memory into digital memory
There’s a saying that when an elder dies, a library burns. It was true until digital media allowed the library to be backed up!
Every kid spends hours on social media, and you could easily get them to learn culture through the same platforms.
Ask them to create content for you (you’ll be surprised at how quickly they would want to get involved!)
Ask them to:
- Create short-form videos featuring an elder who still knows how to do a certain thing everyone else forgot
- Get different audio stories made, such as the way their town sounds during a festival, or the song that only comes out when someone turns sixty, etc.
- Ask them to narrate, in their own words, the before-and-after photo sets of a historic site.
All of these media files are owned by the students. And when you publish them through your page (don’t forget to tag them!), you’ll see that pride kick in. Their work is public. Their name is attached. For a generation that literally lives online, visibility is everything!
4. Connect heritage to real skills (so it “counts,” not just “feels nice”)
Students (and their parents, and definitely their teachers) perk up the moment a project comes with actual skills attached.
With any heritage project announcement, talk about what real-world, resume-level skills they will learn, e.g.,
- Interviewing
- Visual storytelling
- Research
- Budgeting for exhibits
- Public speaking
And if you really want them invested, give their work an audience. have them present their work to the crowd visiting your museum, and publish it on your socials.
Any form of tangible recognition is also a great way to engage the students. Award them a certificate or a school-record mention that they can add to their portfolio. There’s ample evidence that suggests that recognition genuinely adds to a better school performance in students.
5. Bring heritage to life with immersion, not posters
There’s no better moment than seeing a student taking off a VR headset, blinking at the present, and whispering, “Wait, that was real?”
Guided AR/VR walk-throughs can drop students into a site as it looked 200, 500, or 2,000 years ago. If you’re wondering how you can show the Colosseum roaring with crowds again to the students, AR/VR tech at Tornado Studios can help you rebuild that past with interactive detail.
Install interactive touchscreens that let students virtually “excavate,” or “restore” an artifact. You could simulate for them an experience of rebuilding a ruined piece by piece.
Gamifying these experiences will make them even better! Assign certain roles to individual students and hold mini competitions among them, where they get to use their critical thinking experiences to win.
You could recreate tactile hand-painted 3D replicas of artifacts to make these experiences inclusive, also for students who are blind or visually impaired.
Heritage does not need sympathy. It needs immersive experiences that ensure people won’t walk away indifferent when they see it collapsing.
How To Turn a Cultural Heritage Project Into An Ongoing School Partnership
A lot of school heritage projects start with great intentions, but they end up dying young. A one-off field trip with an obligatory group photo in front of an ancient exhibit can never build genuine inspiration among students to preserve cultural heritage.
An ongoing partnership between schools and museums needs a local ecosystem that keeps growing, year after year.
Bring in elders, craftspeople with calloused hands, local historians, tradition-bearers, etc, to work side-by-side with students. Tactile learning under experts can never compare with a slideshow.
UNESCO says that such intergenerational exchange is one of the most reliable ways to encourage young people to keep the traditions alive.
Your partnership should also give your students public moments. Allow them to host pop-up exhibits where they organize the entire event by themselves and have fun along the way.
Store the photos, videos, oral histories, and reconstructions from these events so the next batch of students can build on them. You will create a continuity loop where one year’s projects become the next year’s starting point.
Cultural Heritage Project Support For Schools: Work With Tornado Studios
The involvement of students in cultural heritage projects becomes much more concrete when they are part of it. The moment they get to touch, record, cook, rebuild, and retell the stories of the past, those moments keep traditions alive.
Tornado Studios aims to help museums and schools transform heritage education into immersive experiences. For example, our team builds 3D reconstructions of historical sites that students can virtually explore, or immersive storytelling apps that weave in local histories.
So if you’re planning a cultural heritage project that doesn’t get ignored after the bus ride back to school, contact Tornado Studios and bring us in early!
FAQs
How do I convince schools to make time for cultural heritage projects when the schedule is already packed?
You’ll have to talk about cultural heritage projects as skill-building activities rather than extra history lessons. Pitch to schools about how these projects improve student communication, digital storytelling, research, and presentation skills.
STEM students in particular get the exposure of a lot of hands-on learning activities, such as 3D scanning or digital archiving.
Schools are always looking out for skill-building opportunities. They would be very interested in projects that lead to future readiness rather than one-off trips to museums that no student remembers six months later.
Our students are not “museum kids.” Will they actually care?
Yes! Our students are not ‘museum kids’ because they have nothing to do during museum visits. Give them something to do during the heritage projects, i.e., build, film, record, remix, etc., and recognize their efforts publicly. The ownership and recognition will eventually make them museum kids!
