Abstract:

Dyclam+ (DYnamics of Cultural LAndscapes heritage Memory and conflictualities) is an European Joint Master Degree that aims to train within two years experts and managers on conservation, sustainable exploitation, valorization and numerical mediation of heritage and cultural landscapes. They will be able to understand the complexity of heritage issues. With its scientific and technical content, its innovative methodology, its team of high-level lecturers, and its multidisciplinary spirit, Dyclam aims to educate adaptable and operational practitioners, with a high potential of employability. Since the first edition of this JMD EU, on academic year 2016/17, the teaching methodology has evolved until now and the short semester in Naples before the final professional stage is become an interesting didactic multicultural laboratory. We start with Erasmus Mundus students in the same large classroom with students of Faculty Engineering: first of all, the names of all countries represented by students was wrote in a first pillar on blackboard in order to write next also few keewords describing each country under the class suggestion. After that, Dyclam students have to presente their origin country confirming some keewords indicated by adding other ones moreimportant for us. This method highlight the difference of point of view between residential populations and foreigners: differences depending on neighbourly or bilateral relationship between countries, link with cultures or religions and internal communication policies about country perception, etc. This experiment was only the first step of our teaching partecipating process and this year, in the present semester other education techniques are explored in order to coach Erasmus Mundus student in a multicultural view, training together to broaden the perspective of the different communities all around the world.

To function, a group needs its members to communicate with each other, so a common vocabulary is needed. This, in turn, can only be built up through the mutual knowledge of the people who are part of that specific community. This applies to any group, even a school or university class, particularly if teachers and learners come from different backgrounds, as is the case with the international Erasmus Mundus Dyclam+ Masters course.

To facilitate this process, during the Neapolitan edition of this master’s degree, in winter 2021, we implemented a very participatory teaching method, interspersed with some workshops, for a class of 19 students from 11 countries, from 4 different continents.

Alongside the frontal teaching (however computer-mediated, due to the physical distancing caused by the Covid-19 pandemic), which was strongly supported by multimedia, the students first produced two power-points, then a podcast.This process brought the class together, enabling them to exchange views and knowledge, and to grasp the similarities and differences between socio-cultural contexts that are distant and different, but also closer and more similar than could be guessed at the beginning of the project.

The exercise allowed them to broaden their views, to recount their own experiences, but also to relativize their point of view, inserting it into a rich and complex reality made up of intersections and exchanges.

Keywords:

International course, multiculturalism, couching, educational experiment, master Erasmus mundus.