Culture and History Platform: FROM young people FOR young people
To give young people a self-determined and participatory access to culture and history is the goal of the project YOUPEDIA and the web platform of the same name. This forms the basis for self-directed excursions and explorations of cultural and historical monuments in public space as well as museums and memorials. YOUPEDIA uses already existing experiences from the educational projects Weimarpedia (KSW) and Grenzgeschichten (Stiftung Zuhören).
At the heart of the project are the young people's perspectives on cultural history topics, which they can work on in their own creative projects especially in the field of media competence e.g. short films, audio contributions, texts or image collages and in turn communicate to their peers on the project's own website YOUPEDIA.de. In this way, they create a bridge to the present - in the way they perceive it.
The use of mobile devices (tablets/smartphones) and the Internet by the young people plays an important role. Since dealing with media is part of young people's everyday life, this project gives them the chance to strengthen their media competence through active action. They deal with different media in order to inform themselves, to communicate and to express their own views through the media. In this way, young people become producers of the history and culture of a place. In this way, the project ties in with the interests of today's young people on the one hand and also establishes links to the curriculum (e.g. history, German, ethics/religion, art etc.) on the other. The offer can take place within the framework of school as well as extracurricular projects and excursions and thus appeals to young people in non-formal youth education as well as those of all school types from secondary level I onwards.
YOUPEDIA is a cooperation between the German Youth Hostel Association, Landesverband Bayern e.V. (DJH) and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar (KSW). In Regensburg the World Heritage Office together with the youth hostel is coordinating the acitivities and development processes of projects within YOUPEDIA.
