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Workshop C
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Workshop A |
Workshop B |
Workshop C |
Workshop D
Workshop C - Session 1 - Questions and Contributions
Haroon Saad: What I would like you to do is turn to the people next to you in groups of 2 or 3 and simply discuss very briefly what responses you have to what you have heard from all the self presentations. and then what I am going to do is simply come round very quickly and get from you issues that you wish to ensure are fed into the debate. Q: It seems that a long term change is needed. To focus people on their own energies and their own abilities rather than having to wait for someone else to do something. Q: In every country in Europe, there is a greater emphasis on participated democracy at all levels, including the right of the child in education, and it is very significant that even in the UK here I have seen schools that have become democratically organised. Q: Knowledge of life could in itself be part of a learning process, and could be a good starting point to other forms of learning as well. We need to develop the power of critical thinking in all citizens to help them guide their way through the information maze and the enormous weight of information available. Q: I think there is also a need of an exchange of good practice, in the field of citizenship, and perhaps also there is a need for more dissemination of the results of projects or appeared projects in that field. Q: European funding is very welcome and many of us rely very heavily on it, but I do not understand why it always has to be so late. I worry about organisations that are not big enough to be able to cope with getting projects started before the funding eventually turns up. Q: How can we ensure the best practice experienced in pilots like CICERO is being implemented in the mainstream system? A: To do that you have to share experiences, and you have to be more committed to actually implement and institutionalise the experiences that you have had in your project. Q: The key question here for us was when the resourcing comes in, and it is very short term, what happens afterwards? In work concerned with social inclusion, such uncertainties lead to reproduction of the inequality, but also mainly to huge inefficiencies in terms of loss of experience, loss of expertise and so on. And a degree of embitterment as funding comes to an end. Q: I come from a very small island in the Mediterranean, which is Malta and sometimes the perspectives which you see in large countries are not exactly the perspectives that we see from a small island. I have been trying to set up groups of people to identify the problems and identify initiatives which can take place within the community itself. Very often you discover that poverty for example, which is often linked to unemployment, is in fact much more due to bad budget mis-management than to actual lack of money within the family itself. So very often we talk of things which may not be in reality the problems which we should tackle in the first place. The problem that I am facing coming from as I said a small island with small communities and perhaps small perspectives as well is the difficulty to get people to work together and set up networks. When people have patches of work and are suspicious of other people taking that patch from them, it is very difficult to convince them to work in teams to work in networks. I mean it is very easy perhaps to set up networks between different nations because no threat is felt to the persons within the nation itself, but when you are trying to set up networks in a society like mine which is not used to working in a participatory way, due to our history of colonisation, a strong Catholic church and so on, which used to be paternalistic but is no more - given this history of dependency, how do you get people to work together to identify what are the needs of the community and how to tackle them effectively? Another question that I would like to raise is very often we take for granted that literacy is very important to people on the margins. Have we identified other survival skills which illiterate people have used to make a success of their life without having literacy skills?
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