Acquiring Key Competences through heritage education RationaleThe European Commission has pointed out that more efforts are needed to achieve the Lisbon strategy targets. In this the need for key competence development is imperative in order to reach these targets. Also the “European agenda for culture in a globalised world” wants to “build on the potential of culture as a concrete input/tool for lifelong learning ...” Heritage education is not only to be seen as a topic in ‘history, art and culture’ subjects but comprises a complex ‘extra muros asset’ offering great potential in terms of raising and maintaining motivation, innovative cross curricular approaches, school – community links, European cultural dimension and reaching the LLP transversal key competences as set out by the Reference Framework: learning to learn, social and civic competences, sense of initiative and entrepreneurship and cultural awareness and expression. An analysis of the Comenius compendia has revealed that only a few projects have focused on cultural heritage education in general and none in specific on the link between the acquisition of key competences and cultural heritage education.In this way Aqueduct is responding to several policy issues and deals in an innovative way with the transversal key competence acquisition challenge and the priorities in the 2009 call for proposals.General aim: To improve the acquisition of the Lifelong Learning transveral key competences in schools through heritage education.Operational aim:To build teacher capacity for competence oriented education in a heritage context.Activities & products• After needs analysis, research and concept development the teacher training organizations and the ‘heritage providers’ confront their views on heritage education and acquiring transversal key competences: approaches to learning through heritage, learning theories, identifying learning outcomes, how to make key competences operational, innovative key competence acquisition, team teaching… This will result in the development of draft guidelines and of criteria to assess the transversal key competence acquisition approach of cultural heritage education initiatives. • The partners will collect, describe and assess good practice in the light of the Aqueduct approach. • A training workshop will prepare partners and members to pilot local, national and international heritage initiatives following the approaches and criteria elaborated in the previous phases. • All this will form the basis for a set of publications (manual, guidelines, teacher training modules) in English and in each partner language to be used by teachers, trainers and teacher trainers. Each partner will organize a one-day in-service training. • Dissemination, and mainstreaming will be established through the training and presentations by a European team of trainers, in-service training days in the partner countries, a final dissemination conference, the project website and the implementation of the training modules in in-service and initial teacher training organizations. The teacher training institutions of the partnership and the networks of schools associated to them will reassure impact to a large teacher community, particularly of the countries involved. All partners are involved in networks and associations and will use these contacts for dissemination and exploitation. A mainstream process will be piloted by the BE associated partner who is also the state education provider in Flanders. The target groupsTeacher trainers, initial teacher training students and teachers in schools reaching 6 – 14 age groups (primary and lower secondary education).