Description
StreetGriot Media Education offers courses and workshops in which youths find support for their creativity, autonomy, and courage to explore their own ideas. In our projects we create intercultural learning environments in which youths can pursue questions that are of importance to them. Children and youths in our projects work on topics that contribute to their understanding of who they are and the world in which they live, such as turning points in their lives, or political and social structures whose effects they experience in their daily lives.
The basic principles of our curriculum are relevance to youths’ lives, active participation, and process orientation. In our projects we create space for applied and academic learning, for emotional and social development, and for youths’positive self-images and the assumption of responsibility on their way to adulthood.
Video technology and digital media are our tools: Youths create their own film projects: they decide on and research content, acquire the necessary technological skills, and artistically express their ideas in the medium of film. They use the internet to research information on their film topics and make public interviews that they conduct in their own communities. They also use webquest learning environments designed by us to reflect on political and emotional topics such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In our courses we work on a wide range of topics which all have in common that they are oriented towards a diversity and social justice perspective. Diversity means that all people – from both dominant and minority backgrounds – have equal and fair opportunities to participate in societal institutions and processes. Youths in our projects appropriate this diversity perspective and analyze criticically their positions and experiences as members of society – and often as minorities in society. In using digital media and video they have the opportunity to participate with their own voices in the mainstream media. Topics addressed so far in our courses have included gender, identity, immigration, intergroup conflict, Islamophobia, and Anti-Semitism.
Since 2000 StreetGriot has been teaching video to youths in Berlin (Germany), Chicago (USA), and currently also Tel Aviv (Israel).
