Capacity Building for Mid-Career Professionals
Oo Lwin Kyaw, a senior ministry official from Myanmar, measures stonework at Vat Phou during one of the workshop's exercises.
As part of the Built Heritage in Southeast Asia Initiative, the Getty Conservation Institute presented a series of capacity-building field workshops and meetings for mid-career Southeast Asian professionals, held at heritage sites. The topic of each workshop varied according to the needs of the target audience and the priorities of the host country partner. These workshops utilized their related sites to illustrate commonly encountered problems in the field and to present real scenarios in which to test and implement conservation theories and methodologies.
The capacity-building field workshops included a balanced combination of classroom lectures, group discussions, participant presentations, and fieldwork exercises. Emphasis was placed on practical problem solving, the design of applicable conservation solutions, discussion of how the proposed conservation approaches are relevant to conditions in the participants' home countries, and interdisciplinary group work. Sites were selected based on how well they embodied the workshop's theme.