Little-known Heritage and Digital Storytelling. School as Protagonist in the Rediscovery of the Locality

The school as the driving force behind an action of rediscovery, enhancement and communication of cultural heritage: this is the ‘heart’ of the ScAR project (‘School Activates Resources’) by Politecnico di Milano, the largest technical university in Italy. ScAR is one of the winning projects of PoliSocial 2017, a social responsibility programme by Politecnico di Milano, which in that year had as theme ‘the suburbs’. ScAR puts some schools (levels 1 to 12) at the centre of knowledge-building processes (Scardamalia & Bereteir, 2006; Conole, 2013; Vuopala et al., 2015; Gillies, 2016) aimed at understanding and conveying, through technologies, the value of their everyday landscape: less ‘glaring’ with respect to ‘official’ cultural heritage, but not less interesting. The students, in their own words, have turned ‘from seeing to looking’, realising ‘that there is no need for planes and exotic destinations’ since also ‘your neighbourhood, after all, can be the starting point of a journey [...] if there is the spirit of discovery’.