Layers of values: Exploring Impact in Culture, Art and Education
How Do We Know it Worked – not just for some, but for everyone?
The event “Layers of Values: Exploring Impact in Culture, Art and Education” took place online on 25 September 2025, from 15:00 to 17:00 CET, hosted by the PULSE-ART and European Citizen Science (ECS) projects. The session gathered 56 participants from diverse backgrounds, with a majority of female attendees (75%), and representation across a wide range of age groups.
Objectives
The event aimed to:
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Create a space for mutual learning, peer exchange, and co-creation around inclusive evaluation practices and tools in cultural and educational projects.
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Highlight successful and inclusive methodologies and tools for impact assessment.
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Foster collaboration and partnerships, especially among projects connected to the New European Bauhaus (NEB) values.
Key Messages
Speakers emphasized that measuring impact in culture, art, and education requires innovative tools that capture intangible outcomes—such as self-confidence, civic engagement, and cultural awareness—often overlooked by traditional evaluation methods.
Art itself emerged as a powerful tool for evaluation, with creative formats such as zines, storytelling, and videogames offering new ways to represent lived experiences and personal transformation.
The discussions also underscored the importance of diversity and inclusion, calling for participatory, accessible, and multilingual evaluation processes that respect multiple identities and learning styles. Education was highlighted as a transformative force, essential to building an equitable and culturally aware future.
Finally, participants stressed that trust and reciprocity are the foundation of collaboration, creating safe spaces for shared learning and ownership of outcomes.
Main Outcomes
The event featured best practice showcases from five European projects demonstrating how arts and citizen science can drive inclusion, innovation, and social transformation:
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Acting4DHH (Greece): Citizen social science for the empowerment of Deaf and Hard of Hearing communities.
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Dancing Philosophy (France): Combining dance and philosophy as tools for reflection and embodiment.
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YouCount (Norway): Participatory approaches amplifying migrant and refugee voices.
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STEAM / MateraHub (Italy): Integrating the arts into STEM to promote creativity, gender equality, and entrepreneurship.
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CREATIVE FLIP (Belgium): Supporting creative and cultural industries in areas such as finance, innovation, and intellectual property.
Three interactive workshops complemented the showcases:
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Workshop 1: Focused on defining and measuring intangible outcomes across five core dimensions—self-confidence and agency, skills and knowledge, civic engagement, education and awareness, and societal/cultural impact—using mixed qualitative and quantitative indicators such as surveys, focus groups, storytelling, and photovoice.
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Workshop 2: Encouraged critical reflection on the evaluator’s role, introducing participatory and co-created evaluation strategies that include multilingual accessibility, transparent criteria, and reflexive practices such as positionality statements and internal reflection.
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Workshop 3: Explored art-based evaluation methods, including zines as inclusive, flexible media for expressing diverse perspectives, and videogames as immersive tools for creativity, gender expression, and critical reflection.
A networking session followed, enabling participants to extend discussions, identify synergies, and strengthen a transnational community committed to fair, creative, and inclusive evaluation practices.
Access to Materials
Participants can access event materials, including recordings, presentations, workshop Miro boards, and screenshots, through the following links:
Acknowledgment
This event report was co-authored by Francisca Casas-Cordero (ISGlobal), Sergi López and Marine Masson (Science For Change), Yanis Ratbi (Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation), María Ruiz de Cossío (Euro-Mediterranean Economists Association), Stefanie Schuerz (Zentrum für Soziale Innovation), Raül Toran (ISGlobal), and Karin Weil González (International Council of Museums and National Cultural Heritage Service in the Los Ríos Region).
Funded by the European Union. The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the granting authority.
