Projekt leírása:
We invited two separate groups of children to learn form each other and create videos together for a period of half a year. The members of these groups live in very different areas. One group consists of children from the Budapest area, the other group is from Borsod county. Needless to say, they have very different social circumstances. Children living in Szomolya, Borsod county are of challenging backround whereas the kids of the other group attend a private school and they are from middle class families.
Our project aimed to inspire these children to create short videos highlighting their identity, their values and lifestyle and send these videos to the other group. We wanted them to confront their imagination of each other with the reality. We also aksed them to create videos about how they imagine the lifestyle of the other group.
After all these preparations, we organised joint classes for the two groups so they met and could get to know each other by doing collaborative tasks. Both group visited the area where the other group live.
There is something we can definitelly say after this experiment. These children grow up in a society that separates them from each other simply because they have different socio-economical background. The Hungarian government introduced a policy that deepens the segregation of poor and roma children in education.
But if you create a safe space where they can meet and know each other, these barriers disappear. It is easy. For example, one night we organised a dinner for the two groups. They listened to each others’ favorite music and had a party. We were amased how easily they could have fun together after only knowing each other for a short time.
With our project we wanted to demonstrate that children of diverse social backround can study together well. This experiment should inspire those who want an education system with no segregation.
Examples of videos we created with the children:
We asked them to say a sentence about themselves and then dubed their voice by someone else of the group. This boy is saying in Hungarian that ‘I love my race very much’. We wanted to create situations when children are dubbing the voices of the other group. So they can realize that there is not much difference between them.
You can check out all the videos of the project on this Vimeo channel.
The project was supported by the Open society Foundations.