Deport Xenophobia from European Classrooms!
With such a catchy title, OBESSU organised its most recent event, a Study Session held in the European Youth Centre in Budapest in cooperation with the Youth Department of the Council of Europe, from the 22nd of February to the 1st of March 2015.
The participants to the Study Session were around 35 school student activists from all over Europe, coming from OBESSU Member, Candidate and Affiliate Organisations.
This year’s Study Session focused on migration, human rights, discrimination, racism and xenophobia. Participants to the event started on Sunday by exploring the concepts of migration, and its various differences, as well as exploring their realities back at home and in their regions. The group realised how different experiences we all individually had, how diverse the group was and how different regions in Europe face different challenges when it comes to migration.
To further explore the concepts of migrations and to connect it to the reality of discrimination, racism and xenophobia, the prep team organised a powerful role play that helped participants to experience, in a controlled space, the process of refugees and asylum seekers when entering a country. This experience served as a starting point to understand how different types of discrimination are in play in societies nowadays, both at the individual level and at structural and institutional level.
The event continued exploring the Human Rights perspective of migration and discrimination. For this, we explored what Human Rights are and the protection mechanisms that are in place to guarantee these. For this, we had a guest speaker called Marcell Lorincz from United for Intercultural Action. Marcell’s contribution helped participants understand the consequences of the “Fortress Europe” policies that are in place right now in the European Union.
After exploring the topic in a more theoretical perspective, the Study Session then focused on practical experiences on the topic and landed in the school reality. On the one hand, we were introduced to the No Hate Speech Movement from the Council of Europe with the aim to combat hate speech online. On the other hand, we had the visit of Ana Catarina Reis Morgado from the Programa Escolhas from Portugal that introduced her work as intercultural educator in a poor neighbourhood in the centre of Lisbon. She talked about their approach and the main difficulties the people living in that neighbourhood faces in their daily life.
Participants were then asked to reflect on what are the elements that make an educational system inclusive, what are the stands their organisations have in the topic and how they work on it. The reflection also served the school student activists to start thinking on ideas to further develop when being back at home in their own realities.
Parallel workshops were offered and these aimed at building capacity of school students to combat xenophobia and discrimination in schools. One workshop was about hate speech in schools, one about media and campaigning, one about advocacy/lobbying and one about peer support and mentoring. The participants found them very useful and empowering.
The final block of the event included an extensive work on the action plans participants would implement when going back home. Starting from the needs they themselves identified in their realities, most of participants developed very interesting campaigns and projects to implement back home. From exchanges in post-conflict areas, to strengthening the work done on discrimination in their own organisations or the development of websites to gather tools and strategies to combat xenophobia in schools were some of the ideas that were created.
Participants went home sad for leaving the European Youth Centre in Budapest, but empowered and convinced that something has to be done at the local and national level to tackle the problem of racism and xenophobia.
The main outcomes of this Study Session will be the action plans participants themselves will implement back home and an activity report that aims at providing some tools and guidance when identifying the problem in the European educational systems, as well as strategies to combat it from the school student union daily work.
More pictures of the event can be found on Facebook.
