The Experience of Managing the City of Porto as a World Heritage Site: How to Teach and How to Learn?

Abstract

What to teach and what to learn at the postgraduate level? The problem that arises today focuses, firstly, on the question “how to teach” and “how to learn”. But we can go further! How to teach and how to learn about a city that, besides its own particular features, is also a World Heritage site? Considering that the Historic Centre of Porto, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1996, can be understood as a learning laboratory, the paper named “the experience of managing the city of Porto as a World Heritage Site: how to teach and how to learn?”, written by Maria Leonor Botelho and Lúcia Maria, aims to address two pedagogical projects developed at the Master’s level, first in the History of Portuguese Art and then, in Art History, Heritage and Visual Culture of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto. Both projects, conducted by the MA students, had the production and the publication of a virtual exhibition on the Google Arts and Culture platform, Porto World Heritage (2015) and Porto de Virtudes (2017) as the main product, although other outputs were created. The first results of these experiments have already been published and discussed in several scientific meetings. With this paper we intend to revisit these projects, thinking about them in an integrated way and as instruments for learning and managing the city and particularly Porto as a World Heritage site.

Maria Leonor Botelho—Teaching associate at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of University of Oporto (Department of Heritage Studies)/Researcher at CITCEM (Transdisciplinary Culture, Space and Memory Research Centre—FCT I&D unit 4059).

Lúcia Maria Cardoso Rosas—Professorial teaching fellow at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of University of Oporto University (Department of Heritage Studies)/Researcher at CITCEM (Transdisciplinary Culture, Space and Memory Research Centre—FCT I&D unit 4059).