For seven months, starting in February, the
\nPolitical Science Department within the Bucharest University has been running
\nthe project Be YourSelfie in Bucharest. An education and urban history
\nprogramme for university and high school students. The project has a dual
\npurpose: to make students aware of the multicultural nature of the city and to
\nhelp them discover Bucharest through hands-on cultural research. The activities
\nin the project include training courses and workshops on urban education,
\nguided tours for university and high school students from Bucharest. Alexandra
\nIancu, a lecturer with the Department of Political Sciences of the Bucharest
\nUniversity has more:<\/p>\n
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We intend to start from several apparently
\nsimple questions like: what is a city?, how is it built?, how does it evolve?,
\nand to address them from a cross-disciplinary perspective. So we organise a
\nseries of training courses for students, with various anthropologists,
\nhistorians, journalists, political analysts and image experts as guest
\ntrainers. We have a number of general courses designed to make students aware
\nof how we relate to the city we are living in. These theoretical courses are
\nfollowed by field trips that give students an opportunity to get in touch with
\nthe surrounding reality, irrespective of the area of Bucharest that they visit:
\nPrimaverii neighbourhood, Rahova neighbourhood, the old town, the outskirts and
\nthe old boyars’ houses or the new residential neighbourhoods. In brief, during
\nthese courses we intend to provide students with this diversity.<\/p>\n
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According to Alexandra Iancu, the initiator of
\nthe project Be YourSelfie in Bucharest, the questions from which the
\nstudents’ research starts are very simple, such as: how does a city function,
\nfrom a social, political, economic and cultural point of view? Which are some
\nof the major problems facing a big city like Bucharest?<\/p>\n
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I believe there is a difference between the
\nway university and high school students look at things. In general, when asked,
\nat the beginning of each project, which the main problems of the city are,
\nstudents tend to reproduce the standard ideas and words they hear on TV. For
\ninstance, they mention the infrastructure, the issue of public transportation,
\nthe fact that the city is not clean, in short, the same problems cited by
\npoliticians. But the purpose of our project is to try to see beyond these
\naspects, which are not to be neglected, to identify the real problems and
\ndefine what the city is beyond this stereotypical language.<\/p>\n
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Alexandra Iancu will tell us next how students
\nreacted after the first training courses and workshops.<\/p>\n
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For the time being we focused on training
\nstudents, and their feedback was very good, especially because we had a great
\nnumber of training sessions. The programme was intensive and students attended
\nthese sessions in big numbers. They were enthusiastic because this is an
\ninformal way of learning, and theoretical courses are accompanied by field
\ntrips. We have signed a number of conventions with high schools from Bucharest,
\nmore than what we had stipulated in the initial project. We work with the
\nCantemir National College, with St. Sava, Matei Basarab, Spiru Haret and
\nGheorghe Lazar high schools. According to the teachers we are working with, the
\nstudents’ feedback is very good, as they are also thrilled with the playful
\ndimension of the project. They are both informed and directly involved. For
\ninstance we organise a prize-winning exhibition, a public exhibition,
\ndisplaying pictures taken by high school students around the city, in their
\nattempt to uncover Bucharest’s cultural diversity. They are delighted with what
\nthey discover. After each workshop, after each guided tour, we have a talk with
\nthem to see how they perceive these experiences, and for the moment, the
\nresults are encouraging.<\/p>\n
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Starting from the intention of the Department
\nof Political Sciences to get out of the formal education framework and to create
\na link between university education and high school education, the project Be YourSelfie in Bucharest is funded through a grant offered by Norway, Iceland,
\nLiechtenstein and the Romanian government. The project will end with a photo
\ncontest and an exhibition of pictures of Bucharest made by the students.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An education and urban history programme for university and high school students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":161027,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44685],"tags":[44785],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-161026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-of-culture","tag-be-yourselfie-in-bucharest"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n