Every Country partner of the project organised and realised a three days Awareness Rising Workshops during this winter, form November 2018 to January 2019.
Our common aim? Thinking with young boys and girls about discriminations to create a change in our world.
We used different activities and strategies to foster the raising of awareness about social (in)justice, discriminations, inclusion and exclusion in workshop’s participants.
Below we focus on the main topics we addressed, giving you a description of what happened during the Workshops.
Discriminations
To address the topic of discrimination different strategies and methodologies where used. Such as work in big or little group, reflection in circle time starting from brainstorming, videos, photos and/or participants’ own ideas and definitions about discrimination. All these activities involved directly the youngsters and allowed them to share their own experiences of discriminations, their feelings and the ethnic belonging in the case of some Roma participants.
Inclusion/Exclusion
During the inclusion/exclusion session the participants have identified different marginalised groups (for example Muslims, people of Roma and Turkish ethnicity in the case of Bulgaria, people with disabilities, low socio-economic status, people with a different sexual orientation and physical appearance). Using active approaches the youngsters have been personally involved in understanding the role of stereotypes and prejudices in creating in-group, out-group and exclusion, the emotions a victim of discrimination could feel and they have been helped to identify the difference among discrimination, marginalisation and uncivil conduct.
In this session some participants claimed they have never been discriminated, other that they live or have lived forms of discriminations and others admitted they have discriminated and showed remorse for doing so.
During the Awareness Rising Workshops what strongly emerged from the participants groups is that the first step to challenge discriminative behaviours and contribute to change for a more inclusive world is starting from one own life and experience.
