“In the first week of school in 2023/24, my Year 7 class experienced a project day on the topic of “Decolonise the Schools” with a wonderful trainer from Bolivia.
Decolonisation is a challenging topic anyway, even more so with such a young school class that still has little knowledge of history in this area.
The trainer had taken this fact into account and prepared for it in particular:
The introduction to the topic was very age-appropriate – entertaining, without incomprehensible technical vocabulary, using multimedia and, above all, with the full personal authenticity of the trainer! Even now, the pupils still remember him fondly.
In the middle section, they were encouraged in a playful way to use different images to recognise where “colonial traps” are hidden in our thinking. The trainer completely dispensed with an instructive lecture, instead changing the social forms again and again so that the young people remained highly motivated and attentive.
In the final part of the project day, the pupils were able to work in small groups to derive thematic focuses from what had been discussed up to that point and create collages. The product-orientated task was a successful conclusion to the workshop. It was particularly appreciated by the students that the trainer took their own focal points seriously and supported them, even if these were sometimes somewhat at odds with his actual content intention.
This workshop is one of the very few times that I have experienced a trainer consciously preparing and focussing on his target group! The trainer certainly left out a lot of things that would have been worth telling, but he would have overwhelmed the students. In this way, he gave them a first encounter with an important topic in line with their level of knowledge and age, which they will certainly encounter again and again.”