“Campus” projects

By offering a dozen different themes to do with the inscription, the various projects endeavour to highlight the relevance of the UNESCO territory issues for the different subjects. The goal? To embed the “UNESCO Loire Valley” listing into curricula and support a cross-disciplinary approach to questions about heritage, environment, landscapes and uses.

Involving field trips and outings on Loire rivercraft, the “campus” projects are a way to organise encounters between the students and specialists in various disciplines, to conduct research across the area and to raise the awareness of young people who will soon be embarking on a career.

2020, an exploratory year

Young people are often unfamiliar with the dimensions defining the UNESCO inscription. Although environmental campaigners have been raising awareness in schools for many years now, they do not tend to focus on the heritage and landscape elements of their worthy cause.

This pilot year thus aimed at a better understanding of how they relate to the region, which they do not experience in terms of its “heritage” or “remarkable” features. “Most of the students’ work has been put on show through exhibitions, videos and websites. Presentations by the younger students are organised during a half-day of discussions in the form of “site-specific narratives”, so they can describe their living environments and their links with the river or landscapes to us,” explains Bruno Marmiroli, Director of Mission Val de Loire.

Among the higher education campuses, students from Agrocampus Ouest (Angers) worked on the agricultural components of the Loire Valley, especially its fields and hedgerows. Students from Polytech Tours, meanwhile, worked in video format on flood risks and prevention in Touraine. Youngsters from the Jacques-Tati community centre in Fleury-les-Aubrais produced a short film with the Loire for background and narrative framework.