Teaching and learning with living heritage: Japanese Hanga printing in art and math classes

Campus Comenius in Brussels, Belgium, is a young school striving for innovation in education, where traditional teaching methods are combined with self-regulated learning. Cultural diversity is a daily reality for the school. Therefore Rembert, the project’s leading teacher, proposed to first conduct an online survey with his students to get a better understanding of their cultural backgrounds. The result was surprising: the school’s 140 students have identified having their roots in 37 countries around the globe and speak 35 different languages at home.

The next step was to organize a school exhibition for which students were asked to bring objects reflecting, in their view, the living heritage of their families – objects related to practices, customs and know-how passed down from generation to generation, close to their hearts. From this exhibition, the Japanese Hanga printing presented by Maori (12) was selected to be part of the school project.

Arts and math teachers worked closely with a UNESCO-trained facilitator and Maori’s grandfather – a practitioner of Hanga printing, living in Japan – to find the best ways to integrate this practice in their lessons. As a result, students learnt this traditional printing technique in art classes, where they created prints integrating their own cultural references. In mathematics, they used the prints to learn about geometric transformation, reflection, translation and rotation.

Videographer: Edouard Joubeaud