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Prejudices and Reality
Start date: Sep 1, 2014, End date: Aug 31, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Going with open eyes through our lives and having worked together with different people from different cultures in former Comenius projects, all of us noticed that our images, believes and ideas of others do not necessarily fit reality. Our project PREJUDICES AND REALITY will draw on that and combine prejudices and reality in an active and interesting way. It will improve the students' and the teachers' critical thinking, creativity, initiative, problem solving, risk assessment, decision taking and constructive management of feelings. The newly-gained knowledge will facilitate and reinforce the understanding of nations living together in Europe, thus reduce the gap between different nations and enable the participants to become active European citizens taking over responsibility for one another. An active European citizen has to understand that our similarities and differences are due to our historical background, but also to natural conditions. Knowledge and intercultural education and dialogue are necessary to produce understanding and tolerance, which will enable us to appreciate one another first as human beings and then as citizens of Europe. When we learn to appreciate the differences, we can create new ways together. In this project the students will create a show with acrobats, clowns, fashion, expositions, poems, theater, pantomime, music, experiments etc. These performances will be filmed and documented in a magazine, a film and a radio show. Additionally, these types of media will give us the opportunity to show the progress of our work and will be used to document the results of our work together. Furthermore, students and teachers will be able to improve their ITC skills by working together in editorial teams and by exchanging knowledge and learning from one another. Each participating country will first of all have to come to terms with the way they think and consider other countries. For this we want to focus on four different main aspects: 1. inhabitants (character, body, language, manners, gestures...), 2. environment (landscape, animals, plants, natural resources, energy, climate...), 3. culture (architecture, food and drink, fashion, music, literature...) and 4. historical conditions (political, economic and social issues). After doing a survey each visiting country has to choose one of the four main aspects and prepare and act out a creative performance based on the results of the survey. All these acts will be presented in the meetings giving the group an insight into the existing prejudices that each country possesses. The host country has to prepare a schedule that allows the students to get to know reality (family life, school life, visit of the town, sights, important ecological, historical, social events and facts etc.). Each person has to document her/his observations with the help of interviews, texts, audio, photo, film ... which is the basis for their following activities. In international workshops the students will underline and compare the countries' prejudices towards the host country and develop a kind of “answer” to the performances seen before. Thus, prejudices and reality can be presented contrastingly in a show at the farewell event. The show acts will be filmed so all people not being able to be at the meeting will have the opportunity to watch it later on. The acts can be of any kind suited to be shown on stage, they are to be chosen on basis of the preferences the group members have and on practicability (limited time, limited resources etc.). The show will be the central element of the whole meeting and the final result of the project. It will never be performed as a whole, but the different elements will be put together into a film. In the end there will be a film that will show us the exisiting prejudices each country possesses as well as the reality in each of the participating countries in an entertaining but at the same time informative way. Hence, our project tries to make people think or re-think about their attitudes towards themselves and others.
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