By Ms. GiannaLia Cogliandro, ENCATC Secretary General
/EDITORIAL
This issue of the ENCATC Scholar – Issue #19 – focuses on equipping educators with practical teaching materials and innovative approaches in response to the rapidly evolving challenges facing the cultural sector. As the world undergoes profound transformations – technological advancements, environmental crises, and shifting societal values – a cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary approach is increasingly crucial to navigate these changes. The 2024 ENCATC Congress, with its theme “Culture that Matters”, emphasized the critical need for education to address these complex dynamics, positioning culture as a key driver of sustainable futures.
By featuring teaching demonstrations presented during the 2024 Education and Research Session, this issue serves as a resource for educators seeking to enrich their methodologies. These demonstrations provide actionable frameworks and creative tools to help educators navigate pressing topics in cultural management and sustainability, fostering dynamic and interdisciplinary learning environments.
Dr. Hyung Yu Park’s “Digital Storytelling – Individual Meaning-Making for Heritage Tourism” demonstrates how the integration of digital storytelling into the curriculum enhances students’ understanding of heritage as a multidimensional and evolving concept. By encouraging students to personalize their learning, this approach fosters deeper engagement and critical reflection. Heritage, often difficult for students to conceptualize, becomes a dynamic subject through the medium of digital stories, enabling students to connect academic concepts to real-world contexts and their own experiences.
Geert Drion’s “Co-creating Cultural Encounter” highlights an innovative framework for facilitating imaginative interactions between the “cultural self” and the “cultural other”. This framework offers both theoretical insights and practical tools for navigating the increasingly polarized cultural discourse, making it highly relevant for educators, policymakers, and practitioners. By fostering collaborative vocabulary and methodologies, this work empowers cultural professionals to build meaningful and creative cross-cultural connections.
In “Environmental Sustainability and the Concert Industry”, Dr. Milena Stefanovic addresses the ecological implications of creative practices through a teaching experience that challenges students’ preconceived notions about sustainability in the cultural sector. The classroom discussions, sparked by contrasting opinions about the relevance of sustainability, reveal the complexity of the issue. By connecting environmental impact with cultural practice, this approach equips future managers to critically engage with sustainability and its intersections with social and economic factors.
Caitlin McKinnon’s “Making the Familiar Strange: Using Zines as a Reflective Tool in Arts Management Education” introduces zines as a dynamic medium for fostering creativity and critical reflection. Zines, unlike traditional publications, are self-made, inherently non-commercial, and often associated with alternative cultures. Their DIY approach allows for unrestricted content, including poetry, narratives, collage, and illustrations, making them an ideal tool for exploring complex ideas. McKinnon’s research highlights the disconnect often felt between arts management practitioners and academia and seeks to bridge this gap by tapping into the tacit, experience-based knowledge that professionals may find difficult to articulate. By incorporating zine workshops into her study, McKinnon provided participants with a hands-on way to deconstruct and reflect on their experiences. The process of creating zines helped make the familiar strange, encouraging a remixing of ideas and offering an alternative lens through which to view arts management education and practice.
Together, these contributions reflect the Congress’s overarching commitment to interdisciplinary approaches and underline the role of education in addressing global challenges through cultural innovation. They exemplify how teaching can be a transformative tool – not only for students but also for the cultural and creative industries at large.
As you delve into this issue, we invite you to consider how these teaching experiences might inspire your own work. How can we, as educators, researchers, and cultural professionals, reimagine our practices to address the urgent need for sustainability? How can we foster a culture that truly matters?
We hope this issue provides both inspiration and practical insights as we collectively navigate the complexities of building sustainable futures.
Biography:
Ms. GiannaLia Cogliandro Beyens is since 2004 the Secretary General of the European network on cultural management and policy, ENCATC. She is also the administrator of the Thomassen mobility programme and serves on several boards. GiannaLia is an expert in EU affairs and international relations, with more than 30 years’ experience in advocacy, cultural policy, and strategic management, in the context of international cultural NGO. Since 1998, GiannaLia has also successfully designed, drafted, and managed a large number of EU cross-sectorial projects in the field of culture, education, and research. Former Policy Officer of the Cultural Forum of EUROCITIES, GiannaLia was also Secretary General of the Association of the European Cities of Culture , AECC. Journalist since 1993, she started her career as Press & PR Officer for the N.A.T.O organisation in Rome. For the European Commission, she wrote 10 Reports on social European policy and a major study on the European Cities of Culture of the year 2000. Educated at the University “La Sapienza” in Rome, GiannaLia holds a Degree in Political Sciences – International Relations and two additional masters in European & International Career Studies, and a in European Constitution. Since 1993, GiannaLia is member of the Association of the Former trainees of the European Union.
