Ksar es Said: Building Tunisian young people's critical engagement with their heritage
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2020-10-12

This paper describes the work undertaken as part of the Digital Documentation of Ksar es-Said Project. This project, funded by the British Council, combined education, history, and heritage for the digital preservation of tangible and intangible aspects of heritage associated with the 19th cent. Palace of Said in Tunis. We produced an interactive 3D model of Ksar es-Said and developed learning resources to build Tunisian students’ critical engagement with their heritage through enquiry learning activities in the 3D model. We used a user-centred approach, based on pre-assessment, mid-term evaluation and post-assessment design. The selection of effective technologies, and the design of the online platform and its associated contents was a complex, non-linear  process.  It  required  formal  and  informal  meetings,  focus  groups,  and  interviews  to  various  stakeholder,  as  well  as  an  important  process  of  mediation  between  the  different  stakeholders involved in the co-creation of contents. While the selection of final contents and activities for the platform required us to reduce the complexity of intangible aspects of Tunisian heritage into a small number of ‘themes’, preliminary assessment of the activities suggests that the learning method proposed is an effective way to actively engage young Tunisian students with the concepts of hybridity and complexity and leaves an open space for teacher-students discussions around constantly changing heritage-values.


Paola Di Giuseppantonio Di Franco, Mark Winterbottom, Fabrizio Galeazzi, Michael Gogan