From teacher training to workshops with students: Creating solidarity messages and sending postcards

After carrying out training sessions with teachers on image and text analysis in April and May, workshops were held with students in educational centres. We have worked in 29 educational centres (including CEIPs, IES, IESO, Art Schools, Universities and Toy libraries) in 10 provinces including: Valencia, Valladolid, Zamora, Palencia, Madrid, Murcia, Jaén, Cádiz, Las Palmas, Toledo and Burgos.

The students were trained in critical thinking and photo analysis before writing their solidarity messages. Thus, through the joint analysis of the images, they have reflected on issues such as the environment, discrimination, migration, unwanted loneliness, mental health, etc.

With these reflections they have written to different people and members of the community, sending the same postcards they have reflected on, which you can find by clicking here. So far, 1759 postcards have been sent.

The postcards have been sent to different members of the community, from anonymous citizens to social service and care workers, prisoners, etc.

Several schools have carried out their chronicles on the process carried out. In this case two centres in the Canary Islands where the humanitarian emergency situation is serious, in the words of CEAR "due to the increase in arrivals during the last months of 2020... inhumane treatment of migrants has become normalised, with thousands of them being forced to remain for weeks (in some cases months) in situations of absolute deprivation of basic services and dignified living conditions: sleeping on the floor or on mats, without a roof over their heads, crammed into minimal spaces and with restricted access to toilets or bathrooms".

For this reason, we consider the development of the activity in these two centres to be particularly relevant: IES Doramas and IES Arucas.

Doramas Secondary School in Moya, through its Philosophy Department, participates in a European educational project with a solidarity theme. Students from our school send postcards, with a message of fraternity, to the workers of two welfare services in the northern municipality: a centre for the elderly and a centre for unaccompanied foreign minors.

For more than a month, in the 3rd and 4th ESO (3rd and 4th ESO) Ethical Values classes, we have developed an activity to work on education for global and democratic citizenship with our students. Its completion coincided with the commemoration of Europe Day, celebrated on 9 May.

Doramas Secondary School (Moya)

Blog of the teacher Miguel Rodríguez. Head of the Philosophy Department. Coordinator of the thematic axis of Cooperation for development and solidarity.

 

From that date and at the initiative of some of the teachers, we worked with the students on the meaning of the project, the images selected and the meaning of the postcards to be sent and the day selected: 9 May, Europe Day. In addition, with some of the teachers, an image interpretation workshop was held in March in order to give the teachers more ideas and tools for the development of the activity with their pupils.

The result, 70 postcards that were sent on the 9th, the result of days of debate, reflection in the classroom and the hope that this activity generates some responses and, above all, awakens awareness in those people who received them and who were chosen at random by teachers of the project.

IES ARUCAS Domingo Rivero.

We are now receiving responses from all those who want to continue this chain of solidarity and fraternity.