Exhibitions are used as a common educational practice to enhance learners’ critical thinking, problem solving and reflection. Although visiting exhibitions has positive learning value in a diversity of settings (museums, galleries, schools, outdoors etc.) and on a large variety of topics (art, history, sciences, etc.), it is a learning process that often remains fairly passive. The experience is generally based on following a path of discovery decided by somebody else, the exhibition curator. This passive aspect is not ideal as a learning process and creates differences in the reception and the interiorizing of the learning: some students, often the ones with the highest cultural capital, engage successfully and benefit from the experience, while many others are left behind. With many changes in the digital age about knowledge “consumption”, it is essential to provide young people with meaningful learning experiences.

For this reason, the #VXdesigners project objective will create a learning methodology to make the most of exhibitions as a pedagogical tool. The project target groups are secondary school pupils, teachers, and all those people who want to benefit from learning through the experience of designing and curating an exhibition. The aim is to develop student’s skills in an inclusive way, for example by paying attention to specific learning needs or cultural differences, and to provide students with the elements and resources to co-create their own virtual exhibition. The project will focus on developing educators’ and pupils’ skills and key competences needed in the XXIst century, such as: searching for creative solutions, planning and analysing, problem-solving and digital skills.
In practice, the project will develop a set of tools to support teachers in implementing an innovative pedagogy with the use of exhibitions, and provide them with guidance and training material to help them create exhibitions to facilitate their student’s learning. The project has the ambition to equip the teachers, educators and museum professionals with tools and knowledge that will allow them to invite young people to a process of co-curating exhibitions, while developing their technical and ICT skills and encouraging inclusive digital exhibitions creation for practical use tailored to their classro with guidance and training material to help them create exhibitions to facilitate their student’s learning. The project has the ambition to equip the teachers, educators and museum professionals with tools and knowledge that will allow them to invite young people to a process of co-curating exhibitions, while developing their technical and ICT skills and encouraging inclusive digital exhibitions creation for practical use tailored to their classroo oms’ needs.

The VX Designers project will offer the following free resources
1) Exhibition and school guide
2) Exhibition generator Platform
3) User guide for virtual exhibitions creation
4) Pedagogical guide
5) Exhibitions design and their pedagogical sequences

All these free Open Educational Resources will be developed and tested during the project in five languages: English, French, Polish, Greek and Spanish. All material will be verified by specialists to ensure that they are as inclusive as possible for learners with specific learning needs, and will be tested in diverse environments and with different social, economic and cultural backgrounds to ensure cultural accessibility and inclusiveness.