One practical experience

Nevelina Pachova and Marcela Otárola and Beatriz Barreiro

On 18th and 19th February we  were in the school Annexa in Girona working with children from eight to ten years old. We introduce to them “The Charter of Cultural Rights of Children”.

They gave us a wonderful welcoming. We are very grateful to each of them and to their great teachers who got involved in the activities with enthusiasm.

We combined movement, story-telling, thinking about cultural rights, discussing and drawing. This combination of body and mind, of words and image, of sounds and introspection, proved to be very useful. We worked on the concepts of “difference”, “freedom”, and “community/group”. We started with an invitation to create through the body images of reactions of people arriving to a space different from what is familiar for him/her. The explanations of these creations were diverse, going from surprise, happiness, expectations, hope, fear, loneliness, vulnerability, and nostalgia. We continued with the reading of some stories of Rodari’s Telephone Tales. The Young Shrimp invited the children to reflect about the concept of cultural freedom. They were afterwards invited to join in groups and to work on one specific right of the Charter of Cultural Rights of Children. One part of the children of each group was invited to think about an example of exercise of such a right. The other was invited to think about a violation of that right. They translated these reflexions in drawings.  These are the rights the children work on:

Article 1. I have the right to interact with other children who are different from myself, with children who who think, dream and speak in other languages, who have other tastes, other religions, or any religion at all, who have other favorite dishes, who sing other songs.
I have the right to have a lot of fun with them and to learn about this world in which I live thanks to their friendship.

Article 4. I have the right to imagine my future, to follow my own dreams, and to help make this world more beautiful and a better place through my ideas, feelings, creations, behaviors and actions.

Article 6. I have the right to have my voice heard and taken into account in relation to any decision that affects me.