An education and urban history programme for university and high school students.
For seven months, starting in February, the Political Science Department within the Bucharest University has been running the project "Be YourSelfie in Bucharest. An education and urban history programme for university and high school students." The project has a dual purpose: to make students aware of the multicultural nature of the city and to help them discover Bucharest through hands-on cultural research. The activities in the project include training courses and workshops on urban education, guided tours for university and high school students from Bucharest. Alexandra Iancu, a lecturer with the Department of Political Sciences of the Bucharest University has more:
"We intend to start from several apparently simple questions like: what is a city?, how is it built?, how does it evolve?, and to address them from a cross-disciplinary perspective. So we organise a series of training courses for students, with various anthropologists, historians, journalists, political analysts and image experts as guest trainers. We have a number of general courses designed to make students aware of how we relate to the city we are living in. These theoretical courses are followed by field trips that give students an opportunity to get in touch with the surrounding reality, irrespective of the area of Bucharest that they visit: Primaverii neighbourhood, Rahova neighbourhood, the old town, the outskirts and the old boyars' houses or the new residential neighbourhoods. In brief, during these courses we intend to provide students with this diversity."
According to Alexandra Iancu, the initiator of the project "Be YourSelfie in Bucharest", the questions from which the students' research starts are very simple, such as: how does a city function, from a social, political, economic and cultural point of view? Which are some of the major problems facing a big city like Bucharest?
"I believe there is a difference between the way university and high school students look at things. In general, when asked, at the beginning of each project, which the main problems of the city are, students tend to reproduce the standard ideas and words they hear on TV. For instance, they mention the infrastructure, the issue of public transportation, the fact that the city is not clean, in short, the same problems cited by politicians. But the purpose of our project is to try to see beyond these aspects, which are not to be neglected, to identify the real problems and define what the city is beyond this stereotypical language."
Alexandra Iancu will tell us next how students reacted after the first training courses and workshops.
"For the time being we focused on training students, and their feedback was very good, especially because we had a great number of training sessions. The programme was intensive and students attended these sessions in big numbers. They were enthusiastic because this is an informal way of learning, and theoretical courses are accompanied by field trips. We have signed a number of conventions with high schools from Bucharest, more than what we had stipulated in the initial project. We work with the Cantemir National College, with St. Sava, Matei Basarab, Spiru Haret and Gheorghe Lazar high schools. According to the teachers we are working with, the students' feedback is very good, as they are also thrilled with the playful dimension of the project. They are both informed and directly involved. For instance we organise a prize-winning exhibition, a public exhibition, displaying pictures taken by high school students around the city, in their attempt to uncover Bucharest's cultural diversity. They are delighted with what they discover. After each workshop, after each guided tour, we have a talk with them to see how they perceive these experiences, and for the moment, the results are encouraging."
Starting from the intention of the Department of Political Sciences to get out of the formal education framework and to create a link between university education and high school education, the project "Be YourSelfie in Bucharest" is funded through a grant offered by Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and the Romanian government. The project will end with a photo contest and an exhibition of pictures of Bucharest made by the students.
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