EDISON Coordination meeting in Zurich
The EDISON project (“Living Democracy Advocacy Campaign – Experience Democracy in Schools now”) launched two years ago with partners from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia.
Due to their composition, the country teams have been implementing the campaign in very different ways, having to adapt it from their original plans due to the restrictions brought in as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. These restrictive measures also meant the partners were not able to meet and hold a joint face-to-face meeting.
This finally changed last month when the country teams were able to meet in person in Zurich at the IPE premises and take a group photo. After two years – and many online monthly meetings – partners met and enjoyed a three-day coordination meeting with the aim of reflecting on past experiences and carefully planning and coordinating the remaining 14 months of the project.
Playful activities such as bingo and the website’s activity cards were used to establish a comfortable atmosphere and set the stage for an intensive three days of work. Photo with dancing A treasure hunt was developed as an entertaining way to delve deeper into the content of the website, literally finding hidden treasures in the site’s potential. Game-based learning was also used as one methodology to foster experience-based learning and create spaces for reflection. Demogames were a great example of this, providing participants the opportunity to work with Competences for Democratic Culture by linking them to real-life situations.
Partners from different countries worked together on the website content and features, going through their different language versions of the Living Democracy material for teachers, principals and parents. Our technical team members Katerina and Sotiris were there ready to take on board any feedback and implement it immediately. Photo with Rolf and LiVDe and us on computers, photo with Sotiris and Katerina. One of the new features is the country map, found on the main page, visually displaying all 15 current language versions of the materials.
But working on the website was not the only task participants did – each one also selected a competence from the democracy videos created by RFCDC describing with a personal example how the particular competence is deployed in their daily lives. The videos were created for publication to mark the International Day of Democracy and after.
Rolf Gollob from the IPE team, now an experienced guide, gave the experts the opportunity to discover with him the secrets of Zurich and enjoy a very interesting, thought-provoking city tour in places the average tourist doesn’t ever have the privilege of entering! Photos from the Tour The meeting concluded with the country teams looking ahead and setting their EDISON goals for 2023, as well as activity and output planning, milestones to be reached and country-specific needs that should be addressed to better support project implementation.
By Gelly Aroni
