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Project Zero, Harvard Graduate

School of Education
Interntaional project > Liz Dawes Duraisingh
Forging a connection between the Georgian National Museum and the Harvard
Graduate School of Education

n February 2015 I had the pleasure of visiting Tbilisi with

two of my colleagues from Project Zero, a research unit
based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in
the United States. We were there to meet up with renowned
journalist Paul Salopek, who is currently engaged in a walk
around the world to retrace the pathways of our ancient human ancestors and to experiment with slow journalism. We
are working with Paul Salopek to develop an educational
component to his Out of Eden walk: a free, online learning
community that connects young people from around the
world in intercultural exchange while inviting them to slow
down to observe the world carefully and listen attentively to
others. To find out more about our project please visit our
website http://learn.outofedenwalk.com/.
Because the has generously hosted Paul Salopek during
his time in Tbilisi, we were able to spend some time at the
museum during our visit. We particularly enjoyed meeting
with the director David Lordkipanidze and members of the
museums education department: Mikheil Tsereteli and Darejan Dzotsenidze. We were also excited to run a workshop
at the museum, which was attended by local educators and
students. In this workshop we introduced our project, Out

of Eden Learn, and invited participants to engage in one of

our slow looking activities by spreading out into the museum galleries in small groups to look carefully at an object
together. We also ran a similar workshop at nearby High
School N: 1. After our visit, the education department collaborated with Paul Salopek to produce a video of local Georgian children going on a walk with him around Tbilisi while
modeling some of our learning activities as a professional
development tool for teachers. Many people from around
the world have watched an English version of this video.
Also accompanying us on our visit to Tbilisi were Stephen
Kahn and Emi Kane from the Abundance Foundation, the organization that supports our work. They were so impressed
by the museums interest in Project Zero ideas about active
learning that they offered to sponsor two museum education staff to visit a Project Zero conference. It is for this reason that Mikheil Tsereteli and Darejan Dzotsenidze travelled
to Amsterdam in early October to learn more about Project
Zero practices and to exchange ideas with educators from
around the world. Looking ahead, we hope to strengthen the
connection between the Georgian National Museum and the
Harvard Graduate School of Education.

GEORGIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM

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