Ακολουθώντας και εφαρμόζοντας τη «Στρατηγική συμμετοχής των παιδιών» του Eurochild, το πρόγραμμα EURODIPLOMATS εστιάζει στο να ενδυναμώσει τα παιδιά να ενεργούν ως πολιτιστικοί διπλωμάτες για μια εύρωστη Ευρώπη ικανή να αντιμετωπίσει νέες προκλήσεις και πιθανές «απειλές». Η επίτευξη του στόχου του προγράμματος βασίζεται στην προσέγγιση της πολιτιστικής διπλωματίας και στη χρήση νέων τεχνολογιών και καινοτόμων και δημιουργικών μεθοδολογιών, όπως η συνεργατική τέχνη, η συλλογική αφήγηση και η ποίηση και η ψηφιακή-πολιτισμική παιδαγωγική.

1. ‘Εmpowering children to act as
cultural diplomats for a robust
and resilient Europe’
EURODIPLOMATS
Project reference: KA227-226D6961

2. Context of the project
 The EU is facing several severe crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the
subsequent socio-economic crisis, the refugee crisis, and tensions between
some of its Member States and third countries.
 To successfully deal with any crisis, ultimate victory is proof that Europe can
successfully overcome any cultural or other differences between its people to
become socially cohesive and resilient to meet current and new threats and
challenges.
 Cultural diplomacy can be the vehicle leading to this victory, as it has the
unique advantage of helping people to adapt more quickly to the demands of
rapid change and the increased speed of change.
 At the same time, over the last few years, the EU has paid increased attention
to fostering dialogue with children about the ways to manage such challenging
situations of crisis. Notably, in 2017, the European Parliament held a debate
with children and young people about the ‘Europe we want’. Similarly, the
Eurochild established its Child Participation Strategy in order to put children
at the heart of Europe by giving them the right and the tools for advocacy and
voice.

3. Project goals
 The first goal of the project is to enable children to become
cultural diplomats so as to act as agents of change in order to
build a socially cohesive and resilient Europe capable of meeting
new threats and challenges.
The achievement of the goal is based on the approach of cultural
diplomacy, and the use of new technologies and innovative and
creative methodologies, such as collaborative art-making,
collaborative storytelling and poetry, and digital-cultural
pedagogies.
 Another important goal of this project is to promote children's
and teachers' training to improve their skills to become agents of
the cultural diplomacy approach, in order to achieve the first
goal of the project.

4. Innovative character
 The very topic of the project and the area it addresses is innovative, as the
EURODIPLOMATS project brings together social cohesion and resilience in
Europe with children's enactment of cultural diplomacy as a form of active
citizenship.
 Thus, the project is innovative because it aims to build a Europe of social
cohesion, robustness, and resilience through a route that has not been used in
the past in school education, that of cultural diplomacy.
 Although many projects have focused on children's cultural citizenship in the
past, no projects have been developed and implemented about cultivating
children's skills in cultural diplomacy.
 The EURODIPLOMATS methodology is an innovation by itself as it will
improve teaching and learning. Accordingly, the innovation of the project also
lies in the use of new technologies, and innovative and creative methodologies,
such as collaborative art-making pedagogy, collaborative storytelling and
poetry pedagogy, and digital-culture pedagogy.

5. Axes of the project
The field
 Cultural diplomacy
/ Art, language, and other aspects of culture
The approach
 Children voices
The tools
 Collaborative art-making
 Collaborative story-telling and poetry
 Digital-cultural pedagogies

6. Axes of the project: The field
 Cultural Diplomacy
According to the EU, culture is both tangible and intangible,
natural, and digital. Thus, we have chosen to focus on cultural
diplomacy through the fields of arts, literature and poetry, but also
technology. All the produced activities and resources will aim to
cultivate all participating children's competence and other soft
skills in cultural diplomacy so as to become agents of change for
building a multicultural Europe of resilience and social cohesion,
which is able to meet new challenges, threats, and crises.

7. What is cultural diplomacy?
 Cultural diplomacy entails a type of public diplomacy and soft
power that refers to the exchange of ideas, information, art,
language, and other aspects of culture among nations and their
peoples in order to foster mutual understanding and
cooperation.
 The goal of cultural diplomacy is for people coming from a
foreign nation to develop a rich understanding of one nation's
ideals and institutions so as to build broad support for social,
economic, and political goals.
 Cultural diplomacy is a course of action based on the exchange
of ideas, values, traditions, and other aspects of culture or
identity, to strengthen relationships and socio-cultural
cooperation, to promote national interests and beyond.

8. The goal of cultural diplomacy
The goal of cultural diplomacy is to positively influence a
foreign audience and use that influence, as a means for
building mutual understanding, by:
- building a positive view of the country's people, culture,
and policies,
- inducing greater cooperation between the two nations,
- supporting change in socio-political policies of the
target nation, and
- preventing and mitigating conflict.

9. Axes of the project: The approach
 Children’s voice is a construct that includes the ways
in which young people have the opportunity to
meaningfully and actively engage in important
decisions that have a considerable impact upon their
lives.

10. Axes of the project: The methods
 Collaborative art-making
 Collaborative art-making and poetry
 Digital-culture pedagogies

11. Collaborative art-making
 Collaborative art-making entails children’s collaborative
work in order to achieve a common goal within their art
group, while learning to share their thoughts (i.e. on
culture, art, and language) and emotions, and use critical
thought to go into the others’ emotions.
 Collaborative art-making may be used as an innovative and
more creative research method to examine children’s
everyday life, experiences, and social interactions. In
such a method, children should become co-interpreters of
their art creations by being encouraged to comment upon
them.

12. Digital-culture pedagogy
 According to digital-cultural pedagogy, the
EURODIPLOMATS project will produce activities and
resources enabling children to participate in online
environments to produce projects focusing on the
intersection of cultural diplomacy and European social
cohesion and resilience.
 Examples of online communication tools to be used are
software, videoconferencing and discussion forums, etc.
 In this pool of activities, we can also focus on promoting
digital culture through our activities.

13. Digital-culture pedagogy
 Digital pedagogy draws upon online intercultural
exchange, which in turn, helps to promote
intercultural sensitivity.
 It is the activity of engaging learners in ‘interaction
and collaborative project work with partners from
other cultures through the tools of online
communication tools such as email,
videoconferencing and discussion forums’
(O’Dowd, 2007: 4).

14. Digital-culture pedagogy: Tools
 Tele-teams with other schools to produce projects on
intercultural topics (e.g. diversity, social justice,
racism, and poverty, and their interconnection to
cultural heritage).
 Children exchange their views on intercultural issues
on e-forums including chat rooms and emailing.
 Tele-presentations through video-conferencing
(use of photographs, videos, audio narrations, and
other means of technology).

15. Digital-culture pedagogy: Tools
 Online critical incident analysis: critical incidents
‘are shorter than case studies and refer to cross-
cultural misunderstandings, problems and clashes.
The incidents do not illustrate the cultural differences
of the interacting parties; rather these are discovered
as the activity is carried out. The use of critical
incidents can bring about pupils’ understanding of
their own personal and cultural identity’ (Flowler &
Blohm (2004: 37-84).
 Children’s online communication with academic
and professional communities that work in the
field of intercultural education

16. Collaborative storytelling and poetry
 During collaborative storytelling or poetry, tellers bring
different ideas and coordinate with each other trying to
create a coherent story or poem.
 Collaborative storytelling can be developed in linear and
nonlinear approaches.
 Linear stories contain exactly one begin, one middle and one
end. All children collaborate on a shared story in the form of relay
and no branches can be developed. Children deeply rely on
evaluating the relationship, continuality and coherence of story
path before sequentially participating in building up the story.
 Nonlinear stories enable children to link and orchestrate
different ideas. Children can thus integrate other’s episodes to
develop different branches of stories.

17. Approach to collaborative storytelling/poetry
(1) Collect: A shared pool is developed to support children to
contribute their ideas and retrieve ideas from others.
Children can refine or elaborate elements contributed by
others with personal ideas. In addition, a shared pool of
versatile elements may also inspire children’s fresh ideas of
storytelling.
(2) Orchestrate: Children retrieve and organise the selected
elements from a shared pool and individually orchestrate
those elements by linking to form a story path. Children
combine assorted contributions to create a personal story
version. Thus, multiple story versions can be emergent and
they can also derived by others for modification. Remix
happens through combining participant’s creations.
(Liu et al., 2010)

18. Approach to collaborative storytelling/poetry
(3) Narrate: Children integrate vocal or written narratives
to elaborate a story consisted of orchestrated elements. A
story can be multiply interpreted with different voices and
tones. Remix thus takes place in the form of adding
personal interpretations to the story.
(4) Publish and evaluate: After the finalised story is
published, children receive other viewer’s comments. The
feedback facilitates children to reflect on their story.
Children can then modify published story based on
comments for advancement. That is, remix occurs while
children providing and adopting comments.
(Liu et al., 2010)

19. Collaborative storytelling/poetry: Tools
 “Web 2.0 is the network as platform; Web 2.0 applications
are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of
that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated
service that gets better the more people use it, consuming
and remixing data from multiple sources, including
individual users, while providing their own data and
services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating
network effects through an architecture of participation”
(Reilly, 2005)
 The platform implements multimedia elements such as
texts, pictures, images, music and narration to increase
children’s engagement and collaboration. More specifically,
children are facilitated to collaboratively sketch pictures,
create animations and share comments of works.

20. Intellectual Outputs
O1 - Cultural-diplomacy methodological tool
O2 - Resources and activities, and training tools

21. O1 - Cultural-diplomacy methodological tool
- O1/A1 National Teachers' and Children's Needs
Analysis
- O1/A2 National Analyses of the State of Art in the
National Languages
- O1/A3 Group of Experts.
- O1/A4 Elaboration of the national reports in
English
- O1/A5 Comparative Analysis
- O1/A6 The EURODIPLOMATS cultural-diplomacy
methodological tool

22. O1/A1 National Teachers' and Children's
Needs Analysis
 P2, P4, P6 and P8 should prepare a CHILDREN’S
questionnaire for the O1/A1 - National Teachers'
and Children's Needs Analysis.
 P1, P3, P5 and P7 should prepare a TEACHER’S
questionnaire for the O1/A1 - National Teachers'
and Children's Needs Analysis.
 The questionnaires will be distributed in the schools–
partners (P2, P4 and P6) in the EURODIPLOMATS
project.

23. O1/A1 National Teachers' and Children's
Needs Analysis
 While the first part of the questionnaires will draw on
the CULTURAL-DIPLOMACY approach per se, the
second part of the questionnaires will will examine
how teachers and children perceive the linkages
between the cultural-diplomacy approach and
building a Europe of social cohesion and resilience in
order to be ready to meet new threats and challenges.
 The questionnaires will be used to collect responses
that will be incorporated in a thematic analysis. Each
country-partner will analyse the questionnaires and
write a report.

24. O1/A2 National Analyses of the State of Art in
the National Languages
 Partners will map the state of the art in their countries by
carrying out a literature review on: (a) the cultural-
diplomacy approach, and (b) the linkages between cultural
diplomacy and building a socially cohesive and resilient
Europe ready to meet new challenges and threats.
 This desk research will be facilitated by examining
materials such as papers, conference presentations, case
studies etc.
 Division of work: P1, P3, P5, P7 that are universities or
professional organisations coming from the same country
will produce one national report in their language. P2, P4,
P6 and P8 will provide feedback on these reports.

25. O1/A3 Group of Experts
 A Group of Experts (O1/A3) in areas of education, cultural
diplomacy, culture and identity, social cohesion coming
both from within and out of the consortium will be created
so as to provide their expertise to guide the progress of the
project and provide their evaluative feedback on the project
outputs and results.
 It will have the form of an informal advisory board of 15
experts that will be formed to steer the project based on
the results of each activity.
 Division of work:
All partners will be involved in the identification and
engagement of experts.

26. O1/A4 Elaboration of the national reports in
English
 The materials selected by O1/A1 and O1/A2 will be analysed
to elaborate national reports in the English language.
 The reports will describe:
- needs and suggestions for developing and implementing
the cultural-diplomacy methodological tool, and
- in what ways the tool might be used for promoting social
cohesion and resilience in Europe, which will become ready
to meet new challenges and threats.
 Experts from the group (O1/A3) will provide their feedback
on these reports.
 Division of work: Partners collaborate to produce
national reports (P1 with P6 / P2 with P3 / P4 with P5 / P7
with P8).

27. O1/A5 Comparative Analysis
 The national reports will be used for the elaboration of
European synthesising report.
 The report will portray commonalities and differences
between the participating countries and leading to
conclusions about the formation of the cultural-diplomacy
methodological tool that will be used for building a robust
and resilient Europe, able to face new challenges.
 Experts from the group (O1/A3) will provide their feedback
on the European synthesising report.
 Division of work: P2, P4 and P6 will work on the
comparative analysis. All partners will provide their
feedback.

28. O1/A6 The EURODIPLOMATS cultural-diplomacy
methodological tool
 On the basis of the European synthesising report (O1/A5), the
consortium will develop the cultural-diplomacy methodological
tool that will be used for social cohesion and resilience in a
multicultural Europe ready to face new threats and challenges.
 The tool will describe this pedagogical approach in terms of
principles, strategies, and practical guidelines regarding its
implementation.
 Experts from the group (O1/A3) will provide their feedback on
the tool. The tool will be validated and improved each time
using the feedback from workshops IO2 so that
conclusions from each workshop are embedded each time
to improve the methodological tool.
 Division of work: P3, P4, P7, P8 will collaborative produce the
tool. All partners will provide their feedback.

29. O2 Resources and activities, and training tools
- O2/A1 The EURODIPLOMATS Resources and
Activities Toolkit - 1st version
- O2/A2 Workshops
- O2/A3 The EURODIPLOMATS Resources and
Activities Toolkit - 2nd version
- O2/A4 EURODIPLOMATS Teachers' Handbook -
O2/A5 EURODIPLOMATS Children's Handbook

30. O2 Resources and activities, and training tools
72 activities (24 activities for each of the 3 pools: (i)
collaborative art-making; (ii) digital-culture pedagogy; (iii)
collaborative storytelling and poetry that elaborate on the
cultural-diplomacy methodological approach promoting a
robust, socially cohesive, and resilient Europe, which is ready to
meet new threats and challenges.
A teachers' handbook: A complete training methodology for
teachers to improve their knowledge and practice with regards
to elaborating on and facilitating the cultural-diplomacy
methodological approach promoting a robust, socially
cohesive, and resilient Europe. The delivery methodology will
be facilitated through workshops with various sessions with
teachers of children of ages 9-15.
The material will be available online and will include
multimedia instructions so that other European teachers
will be able to conduct workshops by themselves or with
collaboration with other personnel. A moodle platform will
also be created for teachers so as to be trained in the project

31. O2 Resources and activities, and training tools
 A children's handbook: A complete training
methodology for children to get them involved in the
cultural-diplomacy approach so as to become agents of
change for building a robust, socially cohesive, and
resilient multicultural Europe, which will be able to meet
new threats and challenges.
 The delivery methodology will be facilitated through
workshops with various sessions that will target children
of ages 9-15.

32. EURODIPLOMATS events
 E1 -International Conference on 'Εmpowering children to
act as cultural diplomats for a robust and resilient Europe'
 E2 - National EURODIPLOMATS event in Spain
 E3 - National EURODIPLOMATS event in Greece
 E4 – National EURODIPLOMATS event in Malta
Transnational Training Activities C1- SP-SCHOOL-EVENT
 Short-term joint staff training events in Greece Other
Dissemination Activities
 Other conferences and annual events, newsletters, social
media coverage, project's website, partners' websites, EU
platforms, blogs, publications, mailing lists, flyers, etc.

33. Thank you for your attention!
hadjisoteriou.c@unic.ac.cy