Heritage education and active learning: Developing community and promoting diversity in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Heritage education is part of the global response to destruction of archaeological sites in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries and will be important in achieving the secondary integration priorities of the Turkish state and NGOs working with Syrian migrants in Turkey. However, the effectiveness and pedagogy of heritage education interventions in diverse MENA communities is under-researched. We present here quantitative and qualitative evaluation data from a pilot project involving 169 teachers and c.2,800 children in Fethiye, SW Turkey. Educational games based on the pedagogic principle of Active Learning were well-received and raised participants' awareness of heritage but teacher confidence in delivering them remained low, even after training. Active Learning effectively engages both local and migrant groups with the shared space that they inhabit, even where its heritage has contested meanings, and heritage education and may have long-term social benefits for communities experiencing disruption and migration caused by conflict.

KEYWORDS:

• Turkey
• Syria
• archaeology
• heritage
• education
• migrants
• community cohesion

Introduction

The destruction of ancient sites and monuments across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) prompted Western governments to act by financing initiatives aimed at recording, conserving and restoring archaeological heritage at risk across the region.¹ Headlines about the sacking of museums, such as Mosul, or the intentional large-scale destruction of iconic sites, such as Palmyra, grab international attention but a less conspicuous yet far more pernicious and enduring form of vandalism has been the proliferation of low-level looting of isolated rural sites which can destroy entire archaeological landscapes (e.g. Roosevelt and Luke 2006; Lauricella et al. 2017). This looting feeds into the Black Market in antiquities which in turn fuels terrorist groups that operate across a much broader region than just those countries directly affected by conflict (Isakhan and Gonzalez 2015). As Peter Stone (1985) observed, the only way to reduce the destruction of heritage is by raising the level of public awareness through education, especially the awareness of children. This is especially true where the heritage resource to be protected is scattered widely across extensive rural landscapes and where local security services and civic bodies are focussed on more pressing social, economic and military needs arising from the regional unrest. Whereas intentional sacking or destruction of prominent archaeology may be conducted by state actors as part of a political or military campaign, insidious low-level looting is equally destructive and emphasises the need for sustained, widespread and, most importantly, fully inclusive heritage education if societal attitudes towards looting, engagement with the Black Market and the importance of cultural patrimony are to be changed (Roosevelt and Luke 2006, 184).

Yvonne Marshall (2002) identified two types of groups that engage with the exploration and preservation of the archaeological resources in any given locality: communities that inhabit a common place; and communities that share common ethnic or cultural descent. Therefore, it is essential to connect newly-arrived communities with the local heritage of their new home region, especially a sense of belonging and community (Ashworth and Graham 2005), if heritage education is to lead to raised community heritage awareness and effective conservation actions. In MENA, this is especially true where conflict has forced people to flee their homes to find security elsewhere (Fiddan-Quesmiyag 2020). Turkey, a country with a population of 82 million, currently hosts 3.5 million refugees from Syria (UNHCR 2018, 3), many of them focussed in those provinces that border onto Syria: Hatay, Gaziantep, Şanlıurfa, Kilis and others (Açıkel 2018, 47–60, Table 3). Whilst it was initially hoped that Syrian refugees would only be temporary misafir (‘guests’) in Turkey, there has been a slow political realization that they are likely to be long-term residents (Açıkel 2018). Therefore, in these border regions, people are inhabiting the same space who no longer share of the common ties that many community archaeology projects frequently build on. The arrival of so many migrants can exacerbate the ‘rupture’ from heritage that some communities already experience in Turkey (Tırpan 2019). This is not a unique situation within community archaeology projects because, as Marshall observed, ‘communities are seldom, if ever, monocultural and are never of one mind’ (2002, 215). MENA communities are more diverse than Western governments and media recognize (Chiovenda 2014) but, to date, little attention has been paid to the pedagogic principles best-suited to engaging such diverse communities with the heritage around them. All communities create boundaries to differentiate themselves from one another (Cohen 1985) and have different needs and social, economic and cultural priorities. This is equally true for the newly arrived Syrian communities in Turkey whose needs and priorities include conserving a collective identity and sense of belonging that is strongly linked to material culture of the past and present. To engage these communities with heritage and to develop their awareness of the importance of archaeology, heritage education projects will need to adopt a new methodological approach. We argue below that if all members of a community are to play a role in the protection of the heritage around them, then they first need to recognize and feel affinity for it, even if it is not part of their own cultural identity (however they choose to define that identity) and that the Active Learning pedagogy is an effective means of achieving this.

Education will be central to the successful integration of Syrian migrants into their new home, as will participation in voluntary social activities (Açıkel 2018, 93 and 97, respectively) and therefore community heritage projects in areas that have recently received Syrian migrants should be a priority for governments and the heritage practitioners alike. Aybike Açıkel’s extensive comparative analysis of Turkish and German social policy for the integration of migrants (2018) identifies housing, employment and education (including Turkish language acquisition) as the ‘primary integration priorities’ of the Turkish state in response to the Syrian migrant crisis. However, she also identifies a number of important ‘secondary integration priorities.’ She concludes that ‘cultural integration is one of the cornerstones of good integration policy’ and ‘information should be given about the history, social norms, art and cultural mobility in Turkey’ (2018, 123). Açıkel therefore identifies historical education as a key to integrating Syrian migrant communities into Turkish society. To understand how this might work in practice it is also helpful to look to UK social policy. Whereas UK policy once promoted multi-culturalism, which ‘focused exclusively on the needs, identities and concerns of each separate ethnic group’ in isolation from one another and ignoring the shared experiences of the community as a whole, a more recent policy development has been the concept of Community Cohesion (Thomas 2011, 91). Although not without its critics (e.g. Ratcliffe 2012), a Community Cohesion approach focuses of the shared experiences of diverse communities who are living alongside one another in the same space to bring about a ‘new narrative of place’ and to ‘promote a common vision and sense of belonging for all communities’ (Cantle 2012, 105). In this context, heritage education interventions not only engage people with the historic environment around them, it also gives them a common sense of purpose in conserving that environment. Furthermore, it does so through group activities such as school or community outings to museums and local heritage attractions that give people a common experience, regardless of language or background.

Funded by the UK government’s Cultural Protection Fund, our Carved in Stone project took a two-stranded approach to tackling looting at a grassroots level by (1) training local heritage professionals, museum staff and community groups across Turkey in rapid, low-cost digital recording methods using Reflectance Transformation Imaging, and (2) piloting community heritage education activities aimed at raising general levels of awareness about archaeology and heritage conservation in a socially-diverse city with a significant migrant community.² A general evaluation report on the Carved in Stone project and an academic article about Reflectance Transformation Imaging recording have now been published (Greaves 2020 and Greaves et al. 2020, respectively). This article analyses the education strand of that project.

Our general aim has been to raise primary children’s awareness of the archaeology of Turkey, where Primary education covers ages 6-14, but also to recognize the damage looting causes and how to report it. The activities we designed did not deliver scientific facts and figures about Turkish archaeology but instead facilitated participants developing their own understandings of what heritage means to them through various creative and enjoyable Active Learning scenarios (Tileston and W 2006). The Active Learning pedagogic model is one in which learners actively construct understandings based on their own personal, educational and cultural experiences. That is to say, an individual’s life experiences and cultural context will affect the way in which they construct knowledge itself (Hofer 2002; Hofer and Pintrich 2012). This is in contrast to a straightforwardly didactic model of learning in which they are simply told historical facts and figures and what to do (or not do) to protect heritage. In Active Learning scenarios learners read, write, reflect, problem solve, experiment and role play with the material they are studying. The key themes of the Active Learning philosophy are co-operation and partnership between the teacher and the learner with the learner being an active participant in their own learning, rather than a passive recipient of knowledge (Jonassen 1991; Johnson and Johnson 2008) as opposed to the ‘banking education model’, which regards learners as passive receptacles of knowledge (Freire 1970). This is a departure from the current delivery method in which: ‘the interpretation of heritage in Turkey provides a good example of the top-down approach, which prevents interactive learning possibilities for children’ (Apaydin 2016). Not only is knowledge acquisition by Active Learning more effective than traditional teaching methods, it also engages participants in deeper learning when measured against Bloom’s taxonomy (Anderson 1994; Sosniak 1994; Anderson and Krathwohl 2001; Krathwohl 2002; Churches 2008) (Figure 1). As Kelsey Hood Cattaneo writes: ‘even authors in the cognitive science discipline suggest that classrooms with an active learning approach can increase student motivation, knowledge retention, and content transferability’ (Cattaneo 2017; 144 citing. Michael 2006; Norman and Schmidt 1992; Vosniadou et al. 2001).

Figure 1. Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy and descriptions of each category as it applies to the classroom. Vanderbilt University Center for Learning, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the English-speaking world, there are numerous Active Learning resources for teachers of both children³ and adults (e.g. Silberman 1996) but fewer resources exist in Turkish and even fewer still specifically designed for use in heritage education. Also, within the formal Turkish education sector ‘ … the design and structure of the curriculum does not allow teachers to teach history in an active way that could make history more relevant to the present. As a consequence, teachers are finding it hard to make history enjoyable, comprehensible and valuable for children’ (Apaydin 2019, 74). It is, therefore, in informal education settings – such as museums – that learning about archaeology and cultural heritage takes place within Turkey and this is especially important in areas where local people do not have the opportunity to finish school (Apaydin 2019) although school and household budgets or distance from museums are also further barriers to engagement.

In addition to its inherent educational benefits, during Active Learning scenarios learners work with the material within their own ‘epistemological frame’ of reference which are, in turn, informed by the learning activity (Scherr and Hammer 2009). Therefore, any understandings and values derived from such Active Learning interventions work with, not against, the participants’ pre-existing cultural values and knowledge base (Cattaneo 2017, 9). Embedding non-directional Active Learning into our educational activities means that our resources appeal to a wide range of participant groups as the activities generally do not presuppose, or project, a fixed set of values or meanings onto the heritage being explored – their aim is simply to raise awareness of the nature and variety of archaeological materials, the consequences of looting, and how to protect archaeological resources.

Materials and methods

We chose to pilot our educational methods in Fethiye, a medium-sized city on Turkey’s south-west Mediterranean coast, because it has accommodated a large number of migrants in recent decades and is far removed from the border area, allowing us to safely test our heritage education intervention with a more established migrant community as a way to begin to model, and hopefully inform, the future experiences of more recent Syrian migrants to Turkey.

Known in antiquity as Telmessos (for references see Greaves et al. 2020), large parts of Fethiye are literally built on the ancient city and its ancient monuments are landmarks that define the modern city’s urban plan and civic identity (Figure 2). There are 36 so-called ‘house tombs’ carved into the bedrock throughout the city (Zahle 1980) and hundreds of smaller rock-cut graves and free-standing tomb structures. The greatest threats to Fethiye’s archaeological heritage come from unsympathetic building development and urban encroachment and also accidental damage to monuments caused by traffic, tourists, and vandals (Greaves et al. 2020). In the city’s mountainous and heavily rural hinterland there are additional risks from quarrying, agricultural intensification, large civil engineering projects (roads, dams), and looting – especially in the remote uplands.

Figure 2. A Lycian stone sarcophagus in the middle of a street in the Keşikkapı quarter of Fethiye. (Photo credit: Alan M. Greaves).

Fethiye is popular with both Turkish and foreign tourists. In 2019, the last pre-COVID year for which figures are available, 3,266,650 foreign tourists entered Muğla province, the eastern part of which is Fethiye, of whom 1,137,108 were British passport holders (Source: T.C. Muğla Valiliği İl Kültür ve Turizm Müdürlüğü). Its relative prosperity and attractive environment make Fethiye a popular place to live and its population has expanded rapidly in recent years. In 2018 the total population of the wider city region was 157,745 and by 2019 that figure had risen to 188,259 (Source: Türkiye İstatistik Kurumu). This rapid growth was due to different forms of inward migration: historically this was rural-urban migration from surrounding villages but now increasingly urban-urban migration from the large urban centres within Turkey (e.g. İstanbul, Ankara, İzmir – see Güner 2017), and transnational migration from overseas (predominantly the UK and more recently Ukraine). As a result, like any modern city, Fethiye’s community is diverse and, at any one time, a significant proportion of its people will be new to the region with no direct connection to, or awareness of, its rich history and heritage. During our project we observed that roughly 30% of the participants were from established local families and 70% were relative newcomers to Fethiye (FETAV 2020).

The population of the city centre (‘Merkez’ district) was 77,237 in 2020 (Source: Türkiye İstatistik Kurumu). Figures of resident foreign nationals are not made public in Turkey and therefore it is hard to be precise and numbers vary year-on-year and also by season. Nevertheless, we have been able to obtain various informal estimates that suggest there are approximately 9,000 non-Turkish residents living in the city, of whom half are British (Source: personal communication with British Honorary Consul for Fethiye, Muğla Province Migration Administration, and Fethiye District Directorates). Non-Turkish residents therefore make up somewhere around 11.65% of the city of Fethiye population (half of whom are British), excluding short-term visitors on tourist visas and mixed households, who generally acquire Turkish citizenship through marriage (see also Bennett-Cook 2022 on the British community in Fethiye). To compare these estimated figures to the number of Syrian migrants in other parts of Turkey is difficult but the number of people in official government protection centres expressed as a percentage of the estimated population of the host province suggests refugees constitute 1.04% of the population in Hatay, 1.14% in Gaziantep, 3.60% in Şanlıurfa, and 16.03% in the significantly smaller province of Kilis (sources: Açıkel 2018, 53: Table 3; https://www.citypopulation.de/en/turkey/). The percentage of British migrants residing within the city of Fethiye is therefore broadly comparable with that currently experienced within those provinces of south-east Turkey most impacted by migration from Syria, albeit under very different circumstances.

However, it would be simplistic to think that the Turkish/non-Turkish divide, although it is the most visible one, is the only social division that exists within Fethiye. As in any contemporary Turkish city, there are religious, ethnic and political differences within communities. For example, Alevis, who describe themselves as being distinct from Islam (Shankland 2003), are a significant religious minority within Turkey (estimated to be between 10% and 40% of the nation’s population, CPIN 2017, 9) and are generally more secularist in their social and political orientation. Taking voting habits as a proxy for social orientation, we can see that in Fethiye’s March 2019 mayoral (Belediye Başkanı) elections 47.72% voted for the secularist CHP party whereas 44.48% voted for the conservative AKP, which is the current national ruling party (Source: sonuc.ysk.gov.tr). Another area of differentiation within Turkish society is the ethnic and cultural differences between Turkish and Kurdish communities who have different values and cultural identities and who mostly reside in the country’s eastern provinces (Girard 2015). Other social differentiators include wealth and educational attainment, which can vary considerably within Fethiye and especially between urban and suburban districts and outlying rural and mountain communities, where access higher schooling can be difficult.

Not only do recent population changes mean that much of the city’s population has no direct connection to its heritage, historical events in Fethiye’s past have also contributed to that disconnect. The exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1922 removed from Fethiye (then known as Makri) the Greek-speaking community that might otherwise feel a direct connection to its historic churches and monasteries (Yıldırım 2007). Key archaeological sites from this period in Fethiye’s history include the monasteries of Afkule and Gemiler Island (Livesley and Akatay 2012) and the abandoned Greek village of Kayaköy, known in Greek as Karmilassos or Levissi, which was popularised by Louis de Bernière’s bestselling novel Birds Without Wings (2004). The city’s Turkish-speaking population was also disconnected from its history when a new Latinised Turkish alphabet was introduced in 1928, as a result of which Ottoman inscriptions in Arabic script are incomprehensible to many. A key monument of this period in Fethiye is the Ahmet Gazi Türbesi tomb and its associated Ottoman period graveyard. As these are national experiences, the need to connect Turkish communities with the heritage around them is not restricted to Fethiye alone.

Fethiye’s resident community, be they local or non-local Turkish or British or other foreign migrants, therefore have no inherent connection to the archaeological heritage that is, quite literally, all around them. That is not to say that there is no interest or affinity for the city’s ancient monuments – far from it as Fethiye’s people take great civic pride in their historic ruins, such as the iconic Tomb of Amintas, and the response to our project was very positive (FETAV 2020). However, the relationships that local communities form with their heritage is not always positive or beneficial. A study of modern communities around Çatalhöyük, a UNESCO World Heritage site in central Turkey, demonstrated that communities who are religious and conservative do not consider this neolithic site to be part of their heritage because it has no links to their identity and values (Apaydin 2016). As Veysel Apaydın has observed, local communities that live among archaeological ruins develop ‘personal and practical relationships with the local heritage sites’ over generations (Apaydin 2019, 77). In the case of Fethiye, the ancient tombs are built into the foundations of modern houses, used as domestic storerooms, and become a focus of graffiti (both modern and ancient) due to their prominence in the urban landscape of the city (Greaves et al. 2020: Figure 12; citing Taş and Taş 2014).

In preparation for our heritage education project, the Carved in Stone team produced 28 educational games. The worksheets are intentionally designed with clear, simple, low-resolution graphics that are reproducible in black-and-white so they can be easily downloaded by teachers and then photocopied at low cost. As far as possible, we tried to develop activities that follow the principles of Active Learning, whilst embedding valuable lessons about heritage conservation in ways that would be transferrable to schools and communities beyond Fethiye. Our target had been to create 30 games (Greaves 2020) but this proved to be a considerable challenge (see below). Nevertheless, we were still able to produce a number of games that did meet these strict criteria. Below are two examples:

Museum maze (Figure 3): This game embeds subtle messaging about heritage conservation. In a standard find-the-way maze game the child uses their pen to navigate to treasure. However, in our version they have found some pottery and must find a way to carry it to the museum for safe-keeping and learn all about it. Importantly, no language is needed to play this particular game and it can be enjoyed by children of all primary age groups, even the very youngest, whilst they are introduced to the idea that archaeological artefacts belong in museums and the correct course of action if they find one to the take it to one. The game also teaches them fine motor skills, and higher order thinking such as directional awareness, forward planning, logic and problem solving.

Historical timeline (Figure 4): In this game, a washing line is set up and measured out in chronological time (e.g. one meter = one millennium). Each participant has a card describing a famous archaeological site in Turkey, which they read out and then peg on the washing line at the appropriate point in ‘time’. Together, the class construct a timeline of Turkey’s history from the famous early temple site of Göbeklitepe (c.10,000 BC) onwards. The cards feature sites that have political significance for different groups within the Turkish Republic, including religious sites of the Ottoman Empire. It also includes iconic sites that are important to secularists, such as the major sites of the Hittite Empire (Atakuman 2008) and Anıtkabir – a giant mausoleum to Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic, that houses a museum of Turkish war of Independence which is significant for the construction of Turkey’s national and secular identity and was featured on bank notes. In this way individuals participate in constructing a historical timeline of Turkey that includes sites that are of emotional, cultural or political significance to them personally, be they secularists or religious conservatives, and see each as part of a whole national history. This exercise also gives children the opportunity to develop skills of literacy (i.e. reading the cards), mathematics (i.e. constructing the scale for the timeline, measuring it out, calculating dates in BC/AD through addition and subtraction, comparison, etc.), logic, visual acuity, spatial awareness, team working and even discussion, debate and negotiation (if they disagree with one another about the order in which the cards should be hung on the line).

Devising activities that simultaneously embed the concepts of Active Learning and heritage conservation, while at the same time being enjoyable to play and easily reproducible by others proved difficult and we sometimes had to ditch our favourite ideas because they did not meet the project’s twin aims. Another challenge was developing activities that would transfer to areas beyond Fethiye. However, it became clear that in order to be effective, the games also had to be relatable to the local community. We therefore divided our games into those that are generally applicable and those that are specific to ancient Lycia, of which Fethiye was once part and which had its own unique funerary culture and alphabet. This inspired our ‘Write Your Name in Ancient Lycian’ activity, which taught children to use the Lycian alphabet phonetically and proved to be very popular. One teenage girl even told to her teacher that she had started keeping her diary in ancient Lycian so that her siblings couldn’t read it!

Figure 3. The ‘Museum Maze’ game. (Image credit: FETAV).

Figure 4. A child using the ‘Historical Timeline’ game. (Photo credit: Gülşen Yegen for FETAV).

Results

The risk to its archaeology and its diverse and dynamic community made Fethiye a good case study to pilot Active Learning heritage activities with participants from differing cultural and educational backgrounds, migrant and non-migrant as well as Turkish-speaking and non-Turkish-speaking, to measure their engagement with the Active Learning games we designed. Working with FETAV (an educational and environmental NGO based in Fethiye), we piloted the games with local schools and community groups (Greaves 2020) in various venues across the city (Figure 5). Training sessions lasted three to four hours and covered six of the games in detail, allowing time for discussion and reflection. Trainees received a certificate of completion (Figure 6), many of whom had never previously visited a museum (13 out of 63 respondents to the pre-training questionnaire said they had never been to a museum before and a further 16 out of 63 had only been once). Between April and June 2017, 118 teachers, 34 volunteers, and 17 university students attended FETAV training at Fethiye Museum or other venues across the city. 153 attendees completed evaluation forms after the sessions, allowing us to monitor any change in their awareness of heritage. During this time, 256 primary school children visited Fethiye Museum and played the Carved in Stone games. An estimated 140 further school groups used them in class with teachers who had been trained by the project. In total, an estimated 2,800 children used the games during the duration of the project and they continue to be used in the region’s schools and museums (Greaves 2020).

Figure 5. Teachers receiving heritage education training in Fethiye Museum. (Photo credit: Gülşen Yegen for FETAV).

Figure 6. A volunteer being awarded a certificate of completion. (Photo credit: Aslı Öz for FETAV).

FETAV prepared a formal self-assessment and evaluation of the education project (FETAV 2020), the quantitative data from which is summarized in Table 1. Comparison between Questions 1 and 2 and the response to Question 7 in the questionnaire results suggest a positive shift in knowledge about the museums/heritage (from 42.48% who claimed they knew nothing about museum education at the outset in Question 1–92.81% saying they knew quite a bit or a lot in Question 2). Qualitative evidence comes from participants’ responses to open questions. In response to the question about what they had learned about heritage education, one wrote: ‘Walk around the museum with the game, know the value of cultural heritage, to teach the concept of protecting’ and another wrote: ‘Learning the functions, historical stories and the importance of conservation of cultural assets.’ The trainees also engaged well not just with content and purpose of the project but also with the concept of Active Learning. Respondents wrote: ‘We were active so the trainings were catchy (Turkish: akılda kalıcı)’ and ‘Games based learning was impressive’. However, 25% of the respondents said that they wished the training had been longer. They were also aware that, to be successful, the programme would need to be delivered beyond the city of Fethiye itself, to disadvantaged rural communities. As one wrote: ‘This educational work has been the proper channel. I hope it reaches the village children too.’

Table 1. Evaluation survey of carved in stone training events at fethiye museum by teachers, parents and community volunteers, March–June 2017.

	Nothing	Some	Quite a Bit	A Lot!
Q8. Would you use the education materials with a group in future?	0	4.58	25.49	69.93
Q7. How much did this training change your perspective of museums?	0	0	27.15	72.85
Q6. Does this education contribute to the preservation of our cultural values?	0	0	25.49	74.51
Q5. How easy will it be to adapt the games to another museum?	0	3.27	37.91	58.82
Q4. Do you think the games raise awareness of cultural heritage protection?	0	0	30.72	69.28
Q3. How effective were the materials?	0	2.7	30.41	66.89
Q2. How much do you think you know heritage education now?	0	7.19	62.09	30.72
Q1. How much did you know about heritage education before?	42.48	45.75	10.46	1.31

Although our general aim of raising awareness of archaeology may, in part, have been met by this intervention, increasing a diverse community’s sense of ownership over the ancient ruins around them will be a generational change and cannot be proven by the snapshot offered by the project’s formal evaluation process. Capturing the longitudinal impact of the project and developing it further will remain a long-term goal for us. To this end, we include here some anecdotal observations of how children interacted with the games and activities in unexpected ways, such as the girl who started writing her diary in ancient Lycian. Anecdotes like these give us insight into not just whether the interventions worked, but also how they worked and what their long-term effect might be.

Our games emphasise the consequences of vandalism and theft. One of the worksheets features statues of roman emperors, based in originals from the ancient theatre of Tlos in Fethiye Museum, that have lost their arms, legs and heads during the intervening centuries and children are invited to imagine what the original statue would have looked like and to draw in the missing parts. We noticed interesting differences in how different age groups reacted to, and interacted with, the sculptures when they saw them in the museum. Whenever a group of 5–6 year old children entered the Tlos Gallery, the missing arms were always the first thing they noticed and when they started to complete the worksheet the whole class would become sad, wishing that they were still intact and asking questions about why they came to be broken and ‘why did they let this happen?’ However, teenagers had a very different reaction and used their mobile phones to take selfies with the statues, as if they were celebrities (Figures 7 and 8).

Figure 7. A university student poses for a photograph with armless statues in the Tlos Gallery at Fethiye Museum. (Photo credit: Gülşen Yegen for FETAV).

Figure 8. Trainee teachers posing for a ‘selfie’ with statues in Fethiye Museum. (Photo credit: Gülşen Yegen for FETAV).

There was also a difference in the way in which groups from rural and urban schools reacted to the educational games and museum visit. When one class from the rural village of Ören in Seydikemer district entered the museum, they were immediately very enthusiastic, asking lots of questions and engaging fully with all the games, artefacts and activities. They were interested in the amphorae on display because in the village they still sometime use similar terracotta pots (locally known as testi). In contrast, groups from urban schools were more reserved in their response to visiting the museum and generally asked fewer questions.

For a community as diverse as Fethiye, the museum visits provided a neutral social space in which people, prompted by the worksheets, could share their own answers and ideas, discuss them with their peers, and learn from one another. For example, during one worksheet on ancient foods some children used the local name çalba for the wild mint plant that is the main ingredient in the popular yabani ada çayi (‘wild island tea’) drink. This activity led to discussions between local children and those whose family were from elsewhere in Turkey. During one museum visit, the children were all from local families but their teachers were from elsewhere in Turkey and the session encouraged the teachers to share stories from their own childhood and family memories, leading the children to share their own stories about where they came from and their own local food and traditions with their teachers. In effect, the museum visits allowed them to share and discuss experiences from their different backgrounds in a ‘Third Space’ that is neither school nor home and, in so doing, to develop social cohesion within the community and across generations (Goins 2010).

Although exhibitions can raise awareness of immigration, so too can the educational activities that are increasingly recognized to be part of the social responsibility of modern museums in the West (Labadi 2017). The thousands of non-Turkish people, mostly English-speaking British, and other nationalities, who have made Fethiye their home allowed us to pilot heritage education games that did not require a knowledge of Turkish. For example, flash cards of ancient artefacts can be used as a ‘snap’ game between players with no shared language. We observed that when playing the games and visiting the museum, children who were native speakers of other languages were able to share quality time together and join in the different activities with their Turkish peers. Parents or volunteers who did not have Turkish could also supervise play in these games, allowing them to participate in our project and benefit from the learning themselves.

Just as the reactions of different groups and individuals to the Active Learning resources and museum visits sometimes highlight their differences, they also showed us where there were areas of commonality. For example, just as we saw that mobile phone ‘selfies’ and celebrity culture informed the way in which teenagers interacted with the sculptures, so too does the fact that young people from all backgrounds have become very politicized by exposure to the Internet and, in particular, that they are very environmentally aware. One of the Active Learning worksheets introduced students to the ancient Lycian hero Bellerophon and the mythical chimera monster that he defeated. In response, children were asked to draw their own hero and design a monster. One Turkish boy drew a hero who looked like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk – the founder of the modern Turkish Republic. Another designed a many-headed monster with the heads of different international politicians (including Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin!) A non-Turkish child designed a monster with the power to destroy the environment. In another activity, students were encouraged to think about what questions they would ask the statues of ancient emperors if they could talk, and the male students would often ask them for advice for their country’s leaders. We were surprised by the strength of the children’s political feelings. We hope that the interpretation-free nature of our Active Learning activities will enable teachers who are palpably aware of the importance of, and contested meaning of, history to support children to form their own understandings of the historical environment that is all around them.

Discussion

Although our original aim was to create generic educational games usable across Turkey, it became evident that we also needed resources that were specific to our case study city of Fethiye because, as Ted Cantle notes, highly localized initiatives are needed to reflect the unique circumstances of each place (Cantle 2012, 108; referencing CIC 2007). This did not, however, compromise our goal of creating resources to engage communities of all types, including migrant communities, with that local heritage.

Learning on this education project has been two-way, because we ourselves have gained valuable insights into how young people engage with heritage and how our work is changing the conversation about archaeology within our community, sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, by taking ‘selfies’ of themselves with statues in the museum, young people engage with archaeology as if it were an extension of the contemporary celebrity culture that they see online. The highly politicized and environmentally conscious way in which the young people responded to archaeology was also an eye-opener for us, again reflecting the influence of their engagement with social media. The training also benefitted the teachers, parents and volunteers who participated in it, many of whom have not previously visited a museum. One wrote: ‘You showed the value of the land we live in.’ The children themselves have also become agents of heritage education and parents have reported that their children now beg them to stop and visit archaeological sites whenever they see a brown road sign when out driving, showing how ‘pester power’ can also engage adults with archaeology – another unintended consequence of our project.

In Turkey, the limitations of the formal history curriculum for schools means that general knowledge of the historical past is largely restricted to the Turkish Ottoman Islamic periods and the secular Republic of Turkey and, consequently ‘ … having limited knowledge about different pasts also affects the protection and preservation of the material cultures, and therefore, neglect, looting and in some cases destruction increase in many parts of Turkey’ (Apaydin 2019, 78). Despite the fact that archaeological discoveries, such as Göbeklitepe, are widely reported in the media introducing archaeological materials can be potentially contentious in contemporary Turkey. Not only is there much to learn in a country with a history as rich as Turkey’s, it also means engaging with unfamiliar pre-Islamic cultures such as the Christian Byzantine Empire and pagan Classical and prehistoric cultures. The recent dropping of evolution from the national curriculum⁴ has made already busy school teachers with no formal training in history wary of navigating such contested subject matter. In this context, Active Learning activities such as the historical timeline game (Figure 4) allow children to construct their own understanding of the chronology and meaning of iconic Turkish archaeological and heritage sites, including sites of significance to secularists and religious conservatives alike, without imposing any judgement or narrative. This is not only significant from the perspective of developing awareness for protection of cultural heritage and material culture of the past but also potentially it can lead to developing ‘historical empathy’ towards the past and contemporary cultures and communities (Endacott and Brooks 2013). This is particularly important for starting a ‘dialogue’ between communities in historically multicultural countries, such as Turkey (Girard 2015, 3).

Museums are important resources for informal education and although there are over 400 museums in Turkey, few of them have dedicated staff or budgets to support education activities (Apaydin 2019). Learning materials like ours can be embedded into the visitor experience at minimal cost, as Fethiye Museum has done (Figure 9), and the Active Learning approach engages people from a wide range of cultural or national backgrounds, even non-Turkish speakers. However, the response of children from rural communities to visiting Fethiye Museum also reminded us that exposure to ‘high’ culture, such as Classical sculpture, can still be an individually empowering form of social capital for them (Bourdieu 1986) and that we have a responsibility to deliver heritage education to communities beyond the museum-going middle classes and reach out into rural and urban areas that experience economic and educational privation. This also highlights the social role and responsibility of heritage attractions, archaeological sites and museums to function as informal education resources (Lynch 2021).

Figure 9. Children using on-gallery education resources inside Fethiye Museum. (Photo credit: Gülşen Yegen for FETAV).

Conclusions

The Carved in Stone project piloted a heritage education intervention using resources based on the pedagogic principle of Active Learning. Our aim was to create resources that were intentionally designed to be inclusive of different social groups in a medium-sized city with a large and diverse community of secular and conservative, local and migrant, Turkish and non-Turkish residents. Working with nearly 169 adult trainee volunteers and teachers and nearly 2,800 children, we made the following observations:

• Communities in the contemporary MENA region are diverse and dynamic and heritage education interventions must recognise this if they are to be effective. In particular, it is important to recognize the contributions and needs of newly-arrived groups as well as those of established populations.

• Active Learning is not only an effective teaching methodology that deepens learning, it also allows individuals to construct their own meanings through their own personal epistemologies and engage with the heritage around them through their own frame of understanding – a significant departure from traditional didactic or ‘top-down’ teaching – making it ideal for engaging in a non-challenging way with communities with diverse life experiences and differing cultural values.

• The historical is the political in the Middle East. As we observed in our pilot, children’s reactions to any heritage they encounter will be highly politicized due to their exposure to social media and their heightened environmental awareness.

• The ways in which young people engage with heritage and the broader impacts of education programs are unpredictable. The unintended effects are likely to be wide-ranging and largely immeasurable but the value of raising awareness of heritage in general is widely acknowledged if we are to reduce looting and vandalism.

In this paper we have shown, by means of a pilot project, that Active Learning can usefully work in a MENA context where heritage is at risk. Heritage education will also be an important ‘secondary integration priority’ for the c.4 m Syrian migrants living in Turkey (Açıkel 2018) and has potential to be included as part of broader social policy development across the MENA region. It will be one of the key methods to enable Turkish children develop empathy towards Syrian migrants through examining their ‘shared’ and ‘common’ human past. Active Learning based heritage education in schools and museums (which are a valuable community resource and a ‘Third Space’ in which informal education and contact between groups can take place) has the potential to contribute towards integration of migrants via Community Cohesion (Cantle 2012). It brings together different social and ethnic groups in learning about, discussing, and improving the treatment of something they have in common – the heritage resources of their shared space. We therefore recommend that Active Learning be explored further as a pedagogic mode for the delivery of heritage education across the MENA region. The long-term effects of this form of intervention on education, Community Cohesion, heritage conservation and its transferability to other regions and contexts will be the subject of a future research projects by this team and, it is hoped, by others.

Declaration of interest statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the British Council Cultural Protection Fund under grant CPS-062-16. Dr Işılay Gürsü of the British Institute at Ankara, Dr Aslı Kandemir of University of Birmingham, Prof. Dr Mehtap Çakan of Gazi University and Kirsty Hall of Liverpool University provided valuable feedback on early drafts of this article. We are extremely grateful to the Directorate of Fethiye Museum for their continuing support for our work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by British Council: [Grant Number CPS-062-16].

Notes on contributors

Alan M. Greaves

Alan M. Greaves is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at The University of Liverpool and has researched Turkey for nearly thirty years. His publications focus on the settlement archaeology of western Anatolia in the first and second millennia BC and heritage conservation in the Near East. In 2005 he was made a National Teaching Fellow by the UK Higher Education Academy, of which he is now a Principal Fellow.

Aslı Öz

Aslı Öz is a project officer for FETAV (Fethiye Tourism, Culture and Environmental Education Foundation), a national educational and environmental NGO started by citizens of Fethiye in 1994 and its income is generated by grants and charitable donations.

Gülşen Yegen

Gülsen Yegen is freelance educational consultant, specialising in drama projects. She was formerly a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Abant İzzet Baysal University, Bolu.

Veysel Apaydın

Veysel Apaydin is Lecturer in Art, Design and Museology in the Department of Culture, Communication and Media, at Institute of Education (IOE), UCL's Faculty of Education and Society. He is the author of Heritage, Education and Social Justice (2022) and numerous articles, and the editor of Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage. Construction, Transformation and Destruction (2020), and Shared Knowledge, Shared Power. Engaging Local and Indigenous Heritage (2018).

Caroline Gilby

Caroline Gilby is a trained primary education practitioner with 16 years’ experience teaching in the UK and Italy. She recently completed an MA in Educational Leadership and Management at the University of Nottingham.

Notes

1 For example, the UK government’s Cultural Protection Fund (https://www.britishcouncil.org/arts/culture-development/cultural-protection-fund) and the US government’s Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Protection (https://eca.state.gov/cultural-heritage-center/ambassadors-fund-cultural-preservation).

2 https://www.britishcouncil.org/arts/culture-development/cultural-protection-fund/projects/carved-in-stone

3 For example:

https://www.nicurriculum.org.uk/docs/key_stages_1_and_2/altm-ks12.pdf

http://www.nicurriculum.org.uk/docs/key_stage_3/ALTM-KS3.pdf

https://www.activelearnprimary.co.uk/login?c=0

https://www.teachactive.org/

4 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/turkey-evolution-teaching-stop-schools-curriculum-erdogan-a7955596.html