Goals

One of the general goals of Viljandi Culture Academy is to support and encourage the cultural self-awareness of our students. Through the formal- and hidden curricula they acquire skills and knowledge for building a dialogue between local (heritage) culture and the contemporary socio-cultural environment.

For Russian-speaking students this goal is in many ways more difficult to accomplish than for Estonian-speakers. The former are all born in Estonia, but most have recent migration experience in their family. Thus they are also living their lives on the borders of two (or more) cultures. From theory and the personal accounts of different people we know that living on the border of different cultures can be a source of positive, rich cultural identity, but often enough it can also lead to insecurity and inability to cope with the immediate environment. Knowing that our tool is education, we wanted to seek answers to the following question: How can we make the first option of positive identity become a reality for people who find themselves, willingly or unwillingly, living on a cultural border? This question is both intellectual and experiential. In the Minerva Project, our goal was to investigate and practise the possibilities of experiential methods, such as social theatre, in order to answer this crucial question in the long run.

In the Minerva Project we also had several more short-term aims such as gaining experience in international communication and cooperation, learning how other partners use the method of social theatre, and last but not least, getting more fluent in using the possibilities of communication technology.