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.