Training on Initiating Dialogue through Shadow Theater

As part of the project “Peace Education for Incusive Classrooms“ we implemented the training “Initaiting Dialogue through Shadow Theater“ throughout December. This training was attended by 20 high school students, aged 15 to 18 coming from diverse ethnicities and who study at the high school “Braka Miladinovci“ our partners in this project. At the first, the students got familiar with what is shadow theater and how is performed. We also introduced the European Youth Foundation and how the foundation is supporting young people. Within these sessions we created a space for getting to know each other and sharing what we dream about, what we are good at and what are our fears.The students have also learned about the constituent parts of creating a shadow theater story. Following the explanations, they detected 4 different problems at the school from which they wrote short stories containing the necessary parts which will be used in the next workshop for making of puppets, settings and making of storyboard. Those stories covered the problems of verbal violence in the classroom, school violence at the school gym, gender equality in school sports and graffiti spreading hate speech based on ethnicity. On the second working day, following the previous working day from this training, the participants used the stories they created as a material to build storyboard for their short shadow scenes. They also divided roles for who will be making background materials, puppets and give voices to the characters. In the next sessions, the students made their backgrounds, sets and puppets from handmade materials. All students took part in the creation process with their best suitable skills: sketching, drawing, cutting or sawing.Finally, the students created the materials and scenarios for two shadow scenes: verbal violence on the Math class and team of girls at the school requiring to have a female basketball team. At the end of this process, the students visited the Shadow Theater “Shadows and Clouds“  to perform their short scenes created on the training “Initiating Dialogue through Shadow Theater“. The first group of students created shadow scene that highlighted the problem of verbal violence happening on the Math class. The second group of students visualised the problem of under-representation of women in the school sport teams. These shadow scenes were created not just to visualize a problem, but also to offer appropriate solution for overcoming them. In the first case, the students in the scene concluded that Math is a science that can have different approaches in finding solution and that verbal violence should not be tolerated by the professors and the peers. While the second case was resolved with a group of girls at the high school requesting to form a female basketball team at the principal office.At the end of the visit, the students discussed the presented problems in the scenes, the solutions they offered and their relevance to their school surrounding. We have also evaluated the overall participation of the students in this training. This training was organized in cooperation with the project partner- Shadow Theater “Shadows and Clouds“ that brought valuable, creative and transformative experience for the young students who participated in the project. The project “Peace Education for Inclusive Classrooms“ is financially supported by the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe. You can find photo albums of each working day of the training on the links bellow: Photos- Day 1 | Photos – Day 2 | Photos- Day 3 #EYFCOE #EKVALIS #YOUTH #STUDENTS #PEACE #NONFORMAL#EDUCATION #SHADOW #THEATER