Editorial
RIGHTS is a two-year Comenius project co-funded by the European Commission under the Lifelong Learning Program. The project started in October 2011 and will finish in September 2013. RIGHTS aims to identify, implement and test a didactic methodology that can help teachers acquire new skills through using the Digital Storytelling approach applied to Global Citizenship Education in order to help motivate new generations of young people to be active as global citizens.
RIGHTS consortium held its first Interim meeting in Sintra in march 26-27. The meeting was hosted by the Portuguese partner Asociacao de Professores de Sintra (APS) and had the aim to discuss the state of the art and the upcoming activites to be implemented.
Spotlight
In Sintra the partners participated in a workshop on Digital Storytelling from the 28th to the 30th March. The workshop was organised and managed by Joe Lambert, CEO at the Centre for Digital Storytelling that is an international non-profit training, project development, and research organization that assists youth and adults around the world in using digital media tools to craft and record meaningful stories from their lives and share these stories in ways that enable learning, build community, and inspire justice. All workshop arrangement were supported by Media Shots. The participants produced their digital stories that will be soon available on the website.
The RIGHTS consortium carried out a research activity with the aim to compare the experiences/expectations of seven European partner countries (Italy, Bulgaria, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Turkey) around Digital Storytelling (DS) and Global Citizenship Education (GCE). The research phase was coordinated by one of the Italian partners in RIGHTS, C.I.E.S..
The idea was to help to map out the main methods guiding GCE with a focus on the activities of those schools attended by 12 to 16 year-old students.
The main research activities were:
• Analysis of the national documentation on the subject and definition of key concepts on the topic of citizenship;
• European Union regulations;
• Facebook page experiment;
• Interviews with secondary school teachers.
The research produced by the Rights project's partners, involving 7 European countries, delineates a highly varied portrait of the concepts, practices and objectives attributed to GCE.
The different pedagogic systems all proceed from the common understanding that global conditions have changed and from the consequent necessity to provide students with new skills, so that they may face up to the challenges of their time with greater resources. The contents of the disciplines related to citizenship still vary from country to country, and though some themes recur, others seem to be dealt with only in some of the countries.
According to the researchers' analysis, the use of the DST method is still in its initial stages; in some contexts, however, reference was made to either some specific texts or Internet sites containing information on this methodology. Although in a couple of the involved countries some projects, entirely revolving around DST as the core of students and teachers' educational activities are allegedly being carried out, in other countries DST is mainly used in a synergy with other, more traditional educational and teaching activities. More precisely, DST is part of an education scheme, a useful tool in the summarising and/or final stages of workshops or learning activities actually based on other techniques and tools. In these contexts, DST is used as an instrument for fixing and preserving an education project on a digital support.
The full research report is available on our website www.rightsproject.eu
The consortium is now working on the definition of the Syllabus as the basis of the next phase: the Experimentation within the schools in the involved countries.
News
RIGHTS Bulgarian partner BGRF (Bulgarian Gender Research Foundation) hosted an international expert meeting organized by Due Diligence Project (www.duediligenceproject.org). 15 prominent experts with international experience from 13 different countries presented the results of international survey implemented on the base of standard questionnaires. The final stage of the meeting was a fruitful discussion about diligence standards and indicators on State duty to prevent, protect, investigate, punish and provide reparation in relation to violence against women as well as to identify good practices, cases from different countries.
Furthermore BGRF in partnership with the Bulgarian Women's Lobby (BWL) and the European Women's Lobby (EWL), the largest coalition of women's NGOs in Europe, is going to host a European conference on "Trafficking in women and prostitution: Bulgarian and European perspectives". The conference is foreseen as a concrete political and awareness raising event for the two women's organisations and will give a key opportunity for Bulgarian stakeholders, politicians, professionals and NGOs, to get in-depth knowledge on the issue of trafficking in women and prostitution, both at Bulgarian and European level, and discuss possible ways forward, based on the experience developed in other EU countries. The conference will take place on 13 July 2012 in Sofia in the framework of EWL campaign 'Together for a Europe free from prostitution'. EU Anti-Trafficking Coordinator Myria Vassiliadou will be a keynote speaker of the conference together with other National Authorities representatives.
Our external expert Media Shots participated in DS7, the 7th annual Digital Storytelling Festival at Wales, Cardiff, in June. The seventh anniversary of the Digital Storytelling Festival in Wales showed the diverse possibilities across a wide spectrum of digital storytelling activity. New, creative ideas, best practices and experiences were shared between practitioners worldwide. Helena Lopes from Media Shots conducted an outbreak session entitled "Corporate Storytelling: Reports from the Front Line" with Pam Sykes from South Africa. Lopes and Sykes shared films and their experiences of DST training in the corporate world and had great response from the audience. This was in fact, the most attended of the concurrent outbreak sessions, which underlines the fact that non profits working in DST are starting to embrace the idea of working the corporate sector. Lopes and Sykes showed stories produced in the workshops their organizations produced. The ensuing debate focused on the important matters of ethical concerns when working in a corporate environment and their importance for internal communication within the corporation. Other names at DS7 include Joe Lambert who conducted the RIGHTS workshop in Sintra with Media Shots, and Annie Correal of the well known Cowbird project.
European conference on "Trafficking in women and prostitution: Bulgarian and European perspectives". The conference will take place on 13 July 2012 in Sofia in the framework of EWL campaign 'Together for a Europe free from prostitution'.
Further info at: http://www.womenlobby.org/spip.php?article3687&lang=en
ICIDS is the premier international conference on interactive digital storytelling. After the successful edition in Canada last year, it comes back to Europe reinforcing its worldwide nature. ICIDS 2012 will take place in the Technological Park of San Sebastián, Spain. November 12 - 15, 2012
For further info: http://icids2012.vicomtech.tv/index.html?id=home.html
RIGHTS WEBSITE: www.rightsproject.eu
