NODEM 2014 Proceedings

The Rotterdam Heritage Coalition: Cooperation between Heritage Institutions
The second strategy to sustain collaboration is the website. There was an immediate need for a common platform
to communicate and share content. The RHC members decided to build a website, keeping in mind that this will
also be useful as a platform for cooperating with primary schools. This website is still under construction.
External cooperation
Enabling external cooperation
Any hurdles the RHC faced concerning the internal cooperation notwithstanding, the most challenging assignment
was enabling the cooperation between the RHC and the primary schools. Although heritage institutions
and primary schools often visit each other’s workspaces as clients, it is very different when the goal is to develop
content together as equal partners. This process can be described in three steps: initial contact, personal
contact and consolidating the contact.
The first step was to make the initial contact with schools, to ask them if they were interested in the project and
convince them to participate. In order to do this, four different communication strategies were used: e-mail,
phone, letters and personal connections. None of these worked extremely well. There was not one strategy
that worked better than the other. Of the 180 primary schools, only five consented to participate in the project.
The reasons for which schools rejected the RHC’s proposals were threefold: not enough time, not enough
money, and having other priorities. There were no exceptions to these reasons.
It is worth mentioning here that a possible cause of the failure of these communication strategies were not
solely the rejection of the schools. In advance, the RHC hypothesized that schools that visited heritage institutions
often would be interested in participating in the project. What they did not realize was that they were asking
for a big commitment in the eyes of the schools and teachers which required creating material costs, valuable
time and effort. Thus the RHC had to adjust their idea about forming relationships with primary schools.
These practical issues aside, the RHC hypothesizes that there is an underlying reason for this failure in the initial
contact phase: the parties involved did not speak the same language. The RHC, for instance, would approach
the schools with a ´heritage project´. However, the concept ´heritage´ is difficult to define and operationalize
for teachers. Teachers did not have a clear view of what heritage is and what they could do with heritage in
their classrooms. This theory was supported by the fact that many schools admitted that they did not really
know how to approach heritage education. Once the RHC members offered teachers practical examples of
lessons (ideas), a dialogue was established. Now, one of the focus points in the communication strategy of the
RHC is using the right key words when speaking with teachers.
Other methods could have been used to gain the commitment of primary schools. For instance, the RHC could
have employed a more top-down strategy, through principals or higher managing directors. They chose not
to do this as it would have inevitably met with resistance at the executive level of the teachers. Since it was the
RHC’s goal to create a dialogue with teachers, this would not have sufficed.
Another strategy could have been through legislation or policy. But the same concern applies: the RHC could
have worked together with council members of the city of Rotterdam and enforced a policy in which every
primary school in the city would have had to participate, but that would have created the same resistance. 5 So
it was important for the RHC to sustain the contact with the five schools that showed interest.
5
In Amsterdam, this was the strategy that was used to stimulate cooperation between heritage institutions and primary schools. Although
more schools participate in the project, which can be compared to the project of the RHC in scope and goals, it is not clear whether this
strategy is more sustainable and/or will lead to a lasting relationship with these schools/teachers.
NODEM 2014 Conference & Expo
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