Edu-Communication from Museums to Formal Education: Cases around Intangible Cultural Heritage and the Co-Creative Paradigm

The COVID-19 pandemic forced museums to rethink their activity in the context of social media, thus generating new ways of communicating and educating about the heritage they preserve. This article explores the indissoluble relationship established between these emerging edu-communication models and the spaces destined to safeguard the intangible cultural heritage (ICH), since the latter is a sociocultural phenomenon whose museumization requires education and civic participation. In order to determine to what extent museum edu-communication inspired by the co-creative paradigm can be extended into formal teaching contexts for the generation of heritage bonds and communities around ICH, two cases produced at the J. Trepat Factory Museum in Tàrrega (Spain) are analyzed through an autoethnographic approach. Both examples encourage a reflection on how the co-creative paradigm makes it possible to raise awareness and involve the entire community in the safeguarding of heritage, while at the same time promoting the expansion and reformulation of the institution’s proposals. We conclude that the integration of this approach into formal pedagogical practices contributes to overcoming some of the limitations of non-formal and informal edu-communication, as well as to generating a rhizomatic identization around ICH.