Looking to Understand Inclusion is a 24-month Strategic Partnership focused on schools, with the horizontal priority of Erasmus+ Social Inclusion as its main theme. The project is composed of 5 European partners: Muserum, Denmark, Dublin City Council, Dublin, The Museum of Photography, Finland, VTS Nederland, Netherlands and Crea360, Spain; all of whom are currently finishing a 36-month Erasmus+ KA2 project ‘Permission to Wonder’. Looking to Understand responds to the research findings and needs of partners and educators involved in Erasmus+ Permission to Wonder, which tested the Visual Thinking Strategies training pathway with educators across different educational settings, classroom and museum based, by supporting individual educators to train in the Visual Thinking Strategies methodology. *Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is a method in the field of visual arts education. The VTS supports learners to respond to an image from their own point of view, offering evidence for their ideas grounded in their observations. It uses discussion as the gateway to understanding the image rather than offering information, which is the opposite way in most conventional art history education. The learner is encouraged to think speculatively, to acknowledge and build on what members of their peer group are saying, and to build confidence and competence in their own ideas and evidence building. Often, educators testimonies reveal that they witness students verbal skills increase as does their critical thinking skills and confidence in speaking. While ‘Looking to Understand’ is following the needs emerging from the research carried on in Permission to Wonder, Looking to Understand is taking a completely new approach. It focuses on how the VTS facilitator can support social inclusion: What does social inclusion mean? What does social inclusion look like between an educator and their students? How do we address the challenges of implicit bias, institutional power in school and museum, historic patterns of marginalisation? – those are the questions which will be addressed during the training activities. This new project will test how image selection in a Visual Thinking Strategies discussion can be used as a tool to practice social inclusion. The theme of social will be unpacked through the examination of visual culture from a range of sources including local and global museum collections, school curricula, and publicly available media archives. It will build ownership of shared values, equality, diversity and non-discrimination by consciously choosing images and paying attention to language when talking about the images with people from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds. The project will target children, age 2-16, within early childhood education settings, elementary and secondary school education and will support key competencies in literacy, multilingual literacy, citizenship, cultural awareness and expression. Looking to Understand will be composed of a series of transnational partner meetings, trainings on image selection and social inclusion, online mentorship and local test projects with Associate Partners, and sharing and exchange of opportunities. Each partner country will have a team of 4 educators (including some of the partners), constituted of a mix of participants to Permission to Wonder and of new contributors, all trained in VTS. All participating educators will be taking part in the trainings and will have access to the online mentorship; they will also be practising image selection within their work environment (school, museum or gallery). Through the trainings, exchange of good practice and local testing, the participants will be able to: • Build ownership of shared values, equality, diversity and non-discrimination. • Consciously choose images representing worlds and values accessible to a variety of people so they will recognise themselves in the pictures and feel enabled to speak their thoughts. • Pay attention to language when working with diverse groups from different backgrounds. • Become conscious of how we are caught in certain stereotypes in visual expression, and become conscious of blind spots and how images can (de)construct prejudices. • Share the testing of images and VTS practice within formal educational settings. • Build on good VTS practice and sustainability across the strategic partners involved to date. • Ensure learning and best practice is shared and with wider VTS community of practice.

The project was designed to offer educators an innovative opportunity to learn to use the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) method to facilitate learning with visual art in schools and in cultural institutions with a remit for arts education. The project guided educators from local arts and education communities in 6 European countries to come together, train and test the VTS method, which supports learners to respond to an image from their own point of view, using a structured and open ended discussion as the gateway for understanding the image rather than offering information. Learners are encouraged to think speculatively, to acknowledge and build on what members of their peer group are saying, and to build confidence and competence in their own ideas and evidence building. The Project Objectives were:1) To test the training pathway of the VTS method with educators in Europe. In the project, educators are understood to encompass primary school classroom teachers, secondary school art teachers, as well as art museum facilitators/educators. 2) To capture and share the impact of the training in VTS on educators and highlight the opportunities and challenges using the VTS method in schools by developing a shared research framework across all partner countries.3) To offer schools and cultural institutions opportunity to introduce the VTS method into their classroom and museum/gallery setting.4) To increase the use of art museums as settings for VTS teaching of visual arts.5) To produce an image bank relevant to VTS compiled from European collections and artists' practice. The project was made of partners from 6 different countries and ranging from large public institutions to small social enterprises and artists' associations. The project was co-ordinated by the Dublin City Arts Office in Dublin City Council. The other partners are the Finnish Museum of Photography, Finland; VTS Nederland, Netherlands; Muserum, Denmark; the Slovenian Association of Fine Arts Societies, and a Spanish consultancy working with schools, called CREA360. 26 associate schools supported educators to practice VTS at local level and 9 associate partners collaborated in this project ranging from museums, curriculum development agencies and municipalities. Each partner was responsible for leading and managing the implementation of the project and the VTS method in their native language, in their schools and cultural institutions.The main target group of the project was educators in schools and cultural institutions. The indirect target group was children and young people. A wider group of interested people began to connect with the project as it was taking place, such as curriculum designers, academic organisations, libraries, and community agencies. Results The results of the project significantly contributed to the horizontal priority of the Erasmus+ Programme, namely achievement for educators of relevant and high quality skills and competencesOver the course of the project, 664 VTS lessons were given to children and young people, and approximately 2205 students were reached by educators participating in the project. 155 classes were involved in VTS sessions. 4 learning, teaching and training activities, led by Senior Trainer of VTS/USA Yoon Kang O’Higgins, took place for educators and partners to build skills and competence in the VTS method. In order to track the quality of the training experience, the educators participated in a short evaluation which was evaluated and reported on by Muserum, Denmark. 6 transnational partner meetings took place to plan, deliver and evaluate the progress of the project as it went along. 01 Research framework - evaluated 8 museum educators, 8 art teachers, 3 subject teachers and 4 primary school teachers participating, led by each partner at local level. The impact for educators was that after training and implementing VTS in the classroom or cultural institution, they felt more confident in facilitating open ended conversations with their students. Therefore, they found themselves using open ended discussion as an approach more frequently in their teaching. While VTS is a visual art methodology, educators highlighted that they had become better at listening to their students voices through facilitating open ended discussions.02 Image Bank - a set of images compiled by all project partners - was tested by educators during classroom and training activities.E12 Multiplier Event - The Permission to Wonder Symposium was planned for 21 April 2020 for Dublin Castle; following its cancellation due to Covid19, we experimented with new ways of disseminating the results, experience and knowledge of the project. A series of webinars via Zoom were attended and viewed by an international audience.Online webinars, infographics, training materials and vimeos of educators are available on the project website www.permissiontowonder.com