Research

Eastern Sugar – workshop plan for secondary and university students

Activity 1: Introduction and mind mapping

Warm Up Exercise: 15 min

Useful for: Focus and lead the attention of the participants to the topic, summarize thoughts.

What Happens? Participants introduce themselves, and say one sentence, or word, or a phrase to a answer the following question: What does Europe mean to you?

Activity 2: Exploring Europe

Activity: 45 min

Useful for: Exploring what people actually know about Europe, its geography and its people.

What happens? Participants are asked to create collaboratively a large map of Europe using - if online - whiteboard, or - if offline - the whole floor space by masking tapes, showing both the outlines of Europe and marking out all the individual countries.

Once the map has been created, the facilitator should lead a reflection. Asking questions such as:

• Was the exercise hard or easy?

• What made it hard?

• How much of the map were you able to contribute to?

• Where were your blind spots?

• As a European do you feel part of all of Europe or only some of it?

• Can you feel part of something that for you has so many blind spots?

Then each participant is given access to lots of strips of different coloured electricians tape. They are then asked to use the different colours to create an emotional map of Europe:

• If they think of a part of Europe to be exciting, forward looking, creative, dynamic, connected

to hope they mark it with yellow

• If they feel a part of Europe is peaceful, safe, comfortable, beautiful etc. they mark with green.

• If they associate a particular part of Europe with danger, fear, conflict, crisis, threat, war etc. they mark it with red

• If they know nothing or little about it, they mark it with blue

The participants reflect on the picture of Europe that emerges. They can be asked:

• Why are particular countries positively represented while others are negatively represented?

• Where do they have their impressions/information from (visiting other countries, newspapers and TV, other social media, relations who have visited or lived in other countries)?

• Does the source of the information affect how bad or good the impression is?

• Did they feel that the view of the country is narrow or broad?

• How did they colour their own country?

• How has this activity affected their view of how they understand Europe?

Notes for facilitators: The facilitator should be invisible while participants are making the maps. He or she should not try to help them, make suggestions or correct what they are doing. Participants should however be encouraged to discuss everything with each other. It should be the activity where the deeper conversations between participants start.

Activity 3: Cultural map of Europe

Activity: 30 min

Useful for: To explore the relationship between culture and identity

Resources needed: Offline: Magazines and newspapers with images, large sheets of paper, coloured pens, sticky tape, glue, scissors; Online: bank of photos (provided by the moderator)

Room layout: Offline: Tables with 4-5 chairs around each, resources on the tables; Online: Breakout rooms with 4 members

What happens? The facilitator divides the participants into groups of around four people. When the groups have found a table and sat down, he or she asks the participants to close their eyes. He or she asks them to think about Europe – what sounds come to their minds? How does Europe make them feel? What images come to their mind? He or she asks them to open their eyes again and to begin to look through all the magazines and newspapers to find and cut out images which make them think of Europe.

Then in their groups they should start discussing how they imagine European culture. What is it? What does it look like? As their ideas begin to form they should collaboratively start to create a collage representing European Culture made up of images they can find in the newspapers and magazines. Together their collage should represent Europe’s culture, its people and cultural values, cultural images, and symbols. They can use any images they find in newspapers and magazines. They can stick these images onto the large sheets of paper, and add to it by drawing images or use other objects as they find them.

After 45 mins each collage is held up or pinned to the wall so that the group can presents their collage to all the other participants pointing out the most important aspects of their (art) work. They explain what assumptions about Europe lie beneath the collages?

In the reflection, participants should consider:

• Was this an easy or hard activity?

• How were the multiple cultures and sub-cultures reflected in the collage?

• Is Europe predominantly forward looking or backward looking?

• What changes might some people have to make to be part of Europe?

• How do people adapt to a changing cultural landscape?

Activity 4: Small group discussion about the films

What happens? Participants are taken into four groups. They watch different parts of the interviews and after watching them, they sit together and try to reconstruct the story itself. After that, discussion is facilitated by questions asked by the moderator.

Activity: 40 min

Resources needed: Extracts from interviews with Christian Laur and Dusan Janícek (Eastern Sugar film archive)