This text written by Museum Educator Tanja Ekholm was originally published in Swedish on KAMU Espoo City Museum’s blog. KAMU Espoo City Museum is learning about inclusion, diversity and new museum concepts for adult learners through Erasmus+ funded mobility project in 2022-2023. 

I had the opportunity to go on a wonderful and inspiring work trip to Flemish Ghent in Belgium at the beginning of October 2022. The trip is part of KAMU Espoo City Museum’s Erasmus+ mobility project, where the museums staff seeks to learn more on how to make the museum more inclusive and accessible to diverse adult learners. The funding enables 15 staff members to go either participate in a course or a training event, such as an international conference, or in a so-called job shadowing, where the participant accompanies the work at another organization in order to gain new ideas and perspectives. At the same time, Erasmus+ enables the establishment of international contacts and hopefully also long-term cooperation between the organizations. 

Preparing the mobility 

My first task was to find a museum, where I could go. Our museum’s Erasmus+ coordinator gave me some tips about interesting museums that worked on issues related to participation, diversity and communicating with the city's residents. I decided to contact the STAM Ghent City Museum in Belgium, because I was interested in the project Co-Gent, where they have actively collaborated with residents in a few different neighborhoods. Among other things, the museums had interviewed people with an immigrant background about their lives in the city, collected photographs and had picnics together outside in the residents' own yard. 

On an October Sunday I flew to Brussels and from there took the train to Ghent, which belongs to the Flemish part of Belgium. I had time to familiarize myself with the city before my official job shadowing started. Ghent is a very beautiful city with many historic old buildings and canals, along which there are various restaurants, where you can sit and have a Belgian beer and watch the people and just enjoy the atmosphere. The city, which was founded as early as the 6th century, has been Europe's second largest city, after Paris, during the 11th–13th centuries. Ghent has especially become known for its textile industry and is still an important industrial city. 

I was lucky enough to get the best contact person imaginable! My contact works as a coordinator (Front Office Manager) in the management team at the museum, and he actively answered my emails before I went to Ghent. Once in Ghent, he picked me up every morning from the hotel I was staying in and I had my workstation next to his in the museum office. It was thanks to him that I had such a varied program during the week and got to meet so many different employees at the museum. 

Cultural heritage work with communities 

During the week I spent at STAM, I got to go on two thorough tours of the museum, during which I got to hear both about the city's history, but mainly about the ideas behind the construction of the exhibitions. The museum building itself was interesting. It consisted of a monastery built in the 14th-17th centuries as well as a completely new part built in the early 2000s. The whole thing was impressive and atmospheric. In one of the long corridors, which were located around a courtyard, there were e.g. one of the nuns' washing places preserved. 

One morning I got to meet Neslihan Dohan, who works with the Co-Gent where they contacted the city's residents and gathered information from them. Neslihan, who herself has a Turkish background, has studied issues around diversity and immigration. We took a walk to the residential area she last worked with, while she talked about the project and how she got people to share their life stories with her. She told me, among other things, that she sometimes stood outside the entrance to a residential building with coffee, juice and biscuits and invited people coming in and out for coffee and thus was able to start a conversation with them. 

Another day I got to know the work of the museum’s volunteers at a church, Heilige Kerstin's Kirche, in the city. The museum has had contact with many different kinds of charitable organizations as well as with private individuals who wanted to work as volunteers at the museum. The charities themselves have fixed the practical work at the museum, while the museum has functioned as an enabling body. The work has included everything from painting the walls of the museum's office to offering lighter jobs to people with mental disabilities. Since then, some private individuals, who are interested in history and museum work, have also come along and got involved in some projects. 

In Heilige Kerstin's Kirche, one of the volunteers talked about the volunteer work in the church, which included describing the various objects in the church. The items were included in a list, but the description of them was now made more accurate. Another volunteer photographed the various objects. I was told a lot of stories about the church objects. The church had, among other things, used to be the leather workers' church. Because of this, there was a statue of Saint Bartholomew in the church. According to the story, this canonized man had been tortured by flaying him. Therefore he stands with his own skin in his hand in a visible place in the church. 

New perspectives and continued collaboration 

My Erasmus+ trip gave me many new perspectives to museum work, while the trip gave me variety for my own job as a Museum Educator at KAMU. I got to know a completely new city and STAM Gent City Museum's way of representing its history. I will continue to keep in touch with my contact person, who promised that in the future we can exchange information when we have done something new in our museums. I hope that Erasmus+ can offer opportunities for others in my industry, but also in other sectors and that we can take advantage of new ways of working and learn from them together.