Project Title: Harmony in the Grottoes: Reimagining Heritage Education Through Sound and Story at Dunhuang

Introduction
I am thrilled to officially introduce my upcoming leadership project: Youth Internship Programme at Dunhuang 2025, organised by the Home and Youth Affairs Bureau (HYAB) and Youth Square Hong Kong, in collaboration with the prestigious Dunhuang Academy. From 9 June to 21 July 2025, I will be immersed in one of the world’s most significant cultural heritage sites, exploring how storytelling, sound, and digital innovation can make ancient art accessible and inspiring for today’s learners.

This project is a natural extension of my ongoing initiative, Harmonize, which seeks to integrate music and multi-sensory experiences into educational design. At Dunhuang, I’ll have a unique opportunity to bring this vision to life within a real-world cultural context.

Objectives & Vision
My work at Dunhuang will centre around three core goals:

   1. Leadership Through Storytelling

• Serving as a student cultural ambassador, I aim to lead 20 guided tours using creative narrative techniques—voice, metaphor, sensory detail—to communicate the meaning behind murals and manuscripts.
• This practice in “leading without authority” will help me refine skills in engaging diverse audiences and conveying purpose through story.

    2. Self-Awareness as a Communicator

• I’ll maintain weekly reflective journals to examine how I adapt complex cultural content for different listeners—a process that will deepen my understanding of my own communicative strengths and areas for growth.

    3. Prototyping a New Heritage Pedagogy

• Post-internship, I will design an educational prototype that integrates Dunhuang’s visual motifs and acoustic properties into classroom or public workshops. This may include using AI-generated soundscapes inspired by cave acoustics, or visual-symbol storytelling activities aimed at making heritage learning more immersive and emotionally resonant.

Why Dunhuang? Why Now?
Dunhuang is not just a site of historical beauty—it’s a living repository of cross-cultural dialogue, spiritual expression, and artistic innovation. Yet today, much of heritage education remains text-heavy and passively consumed, especially in exam-oriented systems like Hong Kong’s.

My project seeks to help change that. By experimenting with sound-based interpretation, narrative framing, and digital tools, I hope to contribute to a more engaging, accessible, and emotionally rich form of cultural learning—one that speaks to a generation raised on multimedia and interactive experiences.

How This Connects to My Broader Work
Regular followers of my project Harmonize will recognise the throughline: whether through music, metaphor, or mural art, I am committed to designing learning that inspires not just understanding, but wonder. Dunhuang offers an ideal context in which to test and expand these ideas.

This internship is also an opportunity to:

• Collaborate with experts from the Dunhuang Academy and peers from diverse backgrounds
• Develop cross-cultural communication and project leadership skills in a real-world setting
• Gather material and insights that will inform my future work in educational design

Join Me on the Journey
I’ll be documenting the entire process—through weekly reflections, voice notes from the caves, and eventually, the rollout of the education prototype. If you’re interested in cultural heritage, educational innovation, or leadership development, I invite you to follow along and join the conversation.

This isn’t just an internship—it’s the beginning of a new chapter in learning how to listen to history.

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