around the world (IBG)
Overview
Project term and location September 2020; eight online sessions within the space of three weeks; two hours each (some participants stayed for longer); individual and pair work between the sessions. Countries and participants Ten participants from Slovakia, Turkey, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Greece and Germany. Educational team One volunteer group leader, technical support by a long-term ESC volunteer.
Creative freedom and the potential to gain lots of expe- rience during the shared creative process without exter- nal support contributed a great deal in terms of self-ef- ficacy. Compared to other virtual projects, participants were very committed to the camp because the process of creating their own content was designed as team work or pair work, with participants assuming mutual respon- sibility for the project. To us, the main disadvantage was that no connection was established between the group and its results and any local organisation or community and its needs. However, that is not a fundamental disad- vantage – such a connection was only raised as an initial idea during the project design phase, but could not be realised in autumn 2020 as most potential facilities like open child and youth work services, kindergartens, etc. were closed or only provided a skeleton service. Respon- sibility for the content of the end product thus lay entire- ly with the participants. The texts the group put together and the accompany- ing illustrations they produced were edited by the group leader after the end of the camp. The intercultural chil- dren’s book was published digitally and sent for the most part to cooperation partners active in the field of child and youth work.
Digital tools BigBlueButton
Brief project description The virtual camp Once upon a time... around the world was designed and coordinated by a volunteer IBG group leader as part of a training programme lasting several months that she was taking part in. Young women from eight countries participated in the project in September 2020 in which they shared and discussed children’s sto- ries from their respective countries. The group’s goal was to put together an intercultural children’s book with “typical” children’s stories from the volunteers’ differ- ent cultures. The stories were written in the volunteers’ original language along with an English translation; the group also provided illustrations. Besides the online ses- sions involving the whole group, participants also met in pairs for additional online meetings so they could continue their “live” exchange on a story’s translation or illustrations. These meetings created more intimate op- portunities for dialogue, which also had a very positive effect on the overall group dynamics.
The group’s collection of stories is available to download at: https://ibg-workcamps.org/files/ibg/documents/ InternationalChildrensStories.pdf
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