In the Avdilar campus of the Doga School in Istanbul, from 23rd-30th November 2013, in the frame of SUSTAIN project http://www.sustain-project.eu it was held the first Biennial on World Citizenship and Democracy, the theme of Education for Sustainable Development selected for this year’s event.
The opening of the exhibition was attended by the local public and also by the project partners together with a delegation of teachers and educators from Bulgaria, Romania and Italy.
Each group took its local students’ artworks related to the main theme of the Biennial. Emanuela Iannazzo of the Centro per lo Sviluppo Creativo “Danilo Dolci” and Patrizia Pappalardo of the Centro internazionale per le Culture Ubuntu, were the two Italian members in attending the event.
During the Biennial opening day, several workshops on good practices of Education for Sustainable Development were conducted and the present teachers and educators were involved in their activities. The exhibition hosted many creative products developed by pre-primary and primary school children from the partner countries through their active participation in didactic practices based on Education for Sustainable Development.
Various local schools, already actively involved in the SUSTAIN project, supported the event by developing the products to exhibit in the Biennial: the Mirto School in Partinico, the Cusman Institut and the Ubuntu Centre in Palermo. The children of these schools, during their lessons and guided by their teachers, went through an imaginary journey on a bus to “Diversityville” city; they learnt how to make a puppet theatre and how to create characters to stage stories of social inclusion; they also had fun in letting their rights dangle from a lively merry-go-down, hanging from their class roof…
The Istanbul Biennial represented both the closing event of the SUSTAIN project and a first experiment which will go on in the following years to exhibit how you can support children education by getting them active and truly engaged in the educative processes themselves.
