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UM and Mdina Cathedral Museum formalise partnership to empower children through Art
The University of Malta (UM) and the Mdina Cathedral Museum have formalised their long-standing collaboration to enhance the accessibility of art and culture for children through the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).
Driven by the belief that children have a right to participate fully in cultural life, the Mdina Cathedral Museum and Prof. Adrian-Mario Gellel have collaborated for the past fifteen years to establish the first museum education activities for children aged 4 to 11 in the Maltese Islands.
The Cathedral Museum houses a prestigious collection of secular and religious treasures, including archaeological artifacts, works by Maltese and European artists, numismatics, and fine silverware. The building and its diverse collections allow children not only to be educated through beauty but also to make sense of, and take agency over, their own reality.
The museum was instrumental in allowing Prof. Gellel to apply educational theory to develop the "Symbol Literacy" approach. This pedagogy aims to develop reasoning and higher-order thinking skills while increasing cultural capital. It operates on the belief that a wider knowledge of symbolic language empowers individuals to interact more fully with the world.
Drawing insights from cognitive psychology, anthropology, and socio-cultural theory, this approach has already welcomed more than 13,000 children to the museum. This fruitful partnership has paved the way for further collaborations with the National Literacy Agency and Heritage Malta, as well as international research into holistic pedagogies and narrative thought.
