Week 40. 4th to 8th of October

On this week we had the guest teacher Tim Gully with the topic “Angels and demons” (young criminals). Before this class we had to read one article about a crime did by two ten year old boys in England “James Bulger murder and his killers Thompson and Venables”.

This article made me think a lot about how two young boys can kill another child; why they made it, only because they watched a film?, what was wrong to get to do such a thing? What about the family of the killed child and how was the situation after this crime with the other children?, what about the influence of the newspapers, TV news? etc.

And the question is: how to work with them in a good way? I think that punish them is not the solution, it’s only remove them away from the society but the problem is still there event that we are not seeing it. I know other cases but this was so surprising to me because of the age of the boys and also that they didn’t had to treat them as adults.

We talked about the situation of the young criminals and we could know the situation in other countries and to different opinions from the people. Really it was so interesting but it was difficult also to understand all.

Week 39. 27th of September to 1st of October

On Monday and Tuesday we had the guest teacher Marcus Breuer. On those two days the topic of the lesson was the Roma people.

First of all, when the teacher said Roma people, we were a little bit confused, then, when he said gypsies was clearer. But how to say it: roma population, gypsy population?; what they prefer? Sometimes we are not conscious of how a “name” can stigmatize a person or a group of people.

We talked about the integration of young Roma into the Educational System and we saw some statistics too. It was helpful to take a general view of how is the situation around different countries.  We could know some of the projects in different schools.

We did an exercise following the Pyramid Model of Psycho-Social Interventions and the STROP Model (A model to stop Chaos in Children’s Life). STROP means: Structure, Talking, Rituals, Organized play and Parental cooperation. We had to talk about our previous experiences with the Strop model. It was interesting because I didn’t know this model and I could put an example about my experience about working with children in a school.

Structure: Fix structure, fix points of time and with a person of reference (it’s no good to change the person of reference all the time)

Talking: feedback to children, they have to have the opportunity to express themselves, the oral language is very important.

Rituals: If there are different cultures on the class they can have different rituals and ways of stay in a class.

Organized play: It’s very useful to learn through playing.

Parental cooperation: Sometimes, there is not the connection between the families and the school.

We made a project too about the community gardens and intercultural dialogue. It was nice to make an intercultural project with people from different cultures. We made a project for 20 families from Africa, South America and Romania; we had to search the focuses of the project, the resources, SWOT (strenghts, weaknesses, opportunities and threats), etc. It was nice but we didn’t have so much time. Then we made an exposition of our project and we could know other projects about other groups. 

Marcus Breuer gave us some more material about Roma people. I think that it was difficult to talk "all" about Roma people only in two days and maybe it could be more interesting with a different structure.