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Remembering the Past and Building the Future Toget..
Remembering the Past and Building the Future Together - Totalitarianism vs Tolerance
Start date: Sep 1, 2014,
End date: Aug 31, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
We created our joint project out of respect for significant historical events in our past, which each partner land can approach and identify with from different perspectives. As educators, we feel a strong need for such events to be remembered and understood by this generation, to ensure that we never forget a tragic period of time that affected the entire world. Likewise, we celebrate the unity of people power to challenge and defeat oppression and domination.
Many of the youth during WW II lost their lives or were injured by events and we will be approaching our project with our 200 participants being of a similar age to those called to make the ultimate sacrifice. Again, there was a strong youth presence in the toppling of the Berlin wall, with the aspects of peer working addressed as to forge unity for good purposes.
By enabling our students to interview and examine first hand witnesses to these major events, we will empower them to understand attitudes, responsibilities and loyalties, together with duty, honour and respect.
Fear played a great role in ensuring cooperation, and we expect to empower our students with self-confidence, a sense of peer to peer involvement and determination to succeed against oppression. They will find that unity for a common good exists not just within their limitations, but forms bonds and trust throughout communities, lands and nations. It will become clearer to them that what happens in one EU land, more often than not has rippling effects through more countries or all.
Through visits to museums, and establishing their own online, students will examine, collect and record materials to discuss, share and treasure for future generations to come.
Swapping recipes and targeting footfall peer traffic within our colleges and schools will raise awareness through fun activities, we will address sharing by making and distributing themed banners to identify with the periods, and the sense of a collective community spirit that we believe is more and more lacking within today’s youth.
A sense of both national and European pride will emerge as we find students accept that they were not responsible for the past, but their actions today shape our present and determine our future, and our exchanges will enable them to meet and live with other cultures and better understand their joint role in how we live and trade together today.
Our joint efforts will be recorded, documented and most placed online within our museum. For such tasks students will develop their investigation, research, editing and IT skills, whilst being faced with many of the materials being in a number of foreign languages, and thereby how to tackle and overcome such barriers, thereby improving their linguistic skills.
Flows will also mix students from a wide diversity of wealth, ethnic, economic and cultural backgrounds etc, presenting multiple opportunities for discussion, understanding and healthy debate. It will become clear how people from those time periods endured and suffered to extents we can barely imagine today, and we will focus on these issues and how ‘today’s generation has never had it so good.’
Finally our project will come to a head with the creation of an Epub compiling the best components of our online museum and experience.
Our events will be shared peer to peer, generation to generation and through all the usual media outlets available.
In the past silence was an isolating enemy, today speaking out is our common friend.