What We've Been Up To: Association for Creativity in Education, Czech Republic

[Radka Jágriková]

First in a series of blog posts presenting recent work of ICEnet partner organisations – focusing on Association for Creativity in Education ('Společnost pro kreativitu ve vzdělávání') from Czech Republic.

 It Matters to Us

The Czech-and-Slovakian project It Matters to Us (in Czech ‘Týká se nás to!’) focuses on young people who are interested in art in public space and civic participation. It offers a great opportunity to actively engage in changing the environment they live in using two different tools to do so.

Firstly, the participants get to work with professional artists (from the field of hip hop, graffiti, street art or slam poetry), on an issue they choose, during several workshops. Secondly, the young people approach local representatives to discuss the issue with them, in order to learn what could be done about it from a political perspective.

Association for Creativity in Education is in charge of a Hip Hop group which has chosen two topics to work with. One part of the group is focusing on passivity of the society versus not being afraid to be active and engaged. The other part, coming from a small town called Jáchymov, wanted to challenge a problem of low to zero offer of part-time jobs for young people within the area they live. In cooperation with two rappers, Bonus and Idea, the participants created their own music and lyrics and recorded some tracks and demos reflecting the issues.

You can find two of the tracks on Youtube (in Czech only; translation should be added soon):

“Naše město (Our Town)”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0rBcbY9yws

“Šance sa chop (Take the Chance)”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2C3egkQNP4

After the tracks got recorded, there was an event organized in Jáchymov’s primary school for the pupils. We introduced the project, including a performance of the tracks and a lecture on engaged art, and a local representative was invited to discuss the issue of part-time jobs for young people. In the afternoon, workshops on hip hop and graffiti took place.

You may look at some pictures from the event:

At the moment, the local representatives in Prague are being approached to open a discussion on using art as a tool for positive community development. We are also getting ready for the project’s great finale in June – a tour presenting the outcomes of all participants in Košice, Banská Bystrica (both in Slovakia) and Prague (Czech Republic).

This project was supported by the EU programme Youth in Action (Mládež v akci) and it is implemented in cooperation with Studio Citadela and cultural centres Záhrada and Tabačka.

We Create Together

The project We Create Together (in Czech ‘Tvoříme Spolu’) connects art and creativity with integration. For a third year, we put together a small group of children from different ethnic minorities and the majority so that they can share a great adventure of creating a story together. This semester the story is evolving around the topic of creating a fantasy world. The group travels over there in order to meet locals (whoever they may be) and to engage with the community in a positive way. While doing so, the children cooperate with two different artists from the fields of visual art and drama, and an educational worker from The Counselling Centre for Integration.

The main goals of We Create Together are integrating children from ethnic minorities within a peer group that includes children from the majority, learning to respect and value differences of others, supporting the understanding and using of Czech language, and developing creativity and social competences of all the children. The project is supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports.

You can have a look at the pictures from our 3^rd meeting where the group chose to visit the Ice-cream Land. They used a magical web to travel. Unfortunately, they got a bit lost on the way and had to communicate with several creatures (such as ghosts, snails or snakes) asking for the right directions. Going to the Ice-cream Land also took them through the ocean and the mountains, but in the end, they finally reached the destination. We shall see what happens next!