Culture and education for resilient and inclusive futures: our side event at MONDIACULT 2025
Building synergies between culture and education is fundamental to an inclusive future based on cultural diversity and human rights. This is one of the key insights emerged from the side event co-organized and moderated by ENCATC and held on Tuesday in the frame of MONDIACULT, the major global conference on cultural policy organized by UNESCO. The co-created event “Culture and Education as a Key Tool for a World in Crisis” put a spotlight on the role of culture and education in tackling global challenges.
During the event, representatives from diverse leading organizations shared concrete initiatives and reflected on how transformative education and cultural policy can inspire sustainable, inclusive futures. One of the focuses was on the necessity for education to go beyond preparing students for specific jobs, equipping them with resilience, critical thinking, cultural awareness, and the ability to learn continuously in uncertain times. In increasingly diverse classrooms, the challenge is to balance authenticity and hybridity, ensuring that students are not only consumers of culture but active shapers of it. Current funding models, however, often remain top-down and disconnected from citizens’ agency, limiting culture’s transformative potential. To foster sustainable futures, young people and communities must be empowered to create and influence culture from an early age. This also requires rethinking curricula and pedagogy, valuing transversal skills that enable collaboration, stakeholder engagement, and intercultural understanding.
Intervening as a moderator and as a speaker, GiannaLia Cogliandro Beyens, Secretary General of ENCATC, declared: “The greatest challenge we face is not a single issue, but the intersection of uncertainty, diversity, hybridity, and agency. Culture and education must work together to prepare people for complex futures and to transform access into true cultural agency. For ENCATC, this means investing in lifelong learning, cultural literacy, and innovative pedagogy that empowers students and communities alike”. This is how culture and education together can meet the crises of our time and contribute to building more resilient, inclusive, and culturally rich societies.
The MONDIACULT side event was co-organized by ENCATC, the Ministry of Culture, Arts, and Knowledge of the Republic of Colombia, the Korea Arts & Culture Education Service, the San Millán de la Cogolla Foundation (Spain), and the Consortium of universities of Sevilla (Spain), University of Zacatecas (Mexico), La Laguna (Tenerife), Bogotá (Colombia), and Cuenca (Ecuador).