Hi everyone,
Well, you made it! I'm delighted that most of you had a good session and are enthusiastic about the experience. A couple of you seem to have had tech issues, for others it went more smoothly - but most of you I don't know yet as you haven't posted your diaries yet - so please can you send them asap!
This week you have the readings to prepare and discuss - it probably won't take up all of the session, but it is a good idea for you to have read the texts beforehand, and make sure you understand them. Also try and think of ideas for your group based on the texts.
For those of you who are connecting from the university - the monday students for the moment have to connect from the library, the others should try Nicola Pantaleone's lab first of all, and only if there is a problem go to the library.
Enjoy this week's session and please remember to send your diaries and chats!
Francesca
Well, you made it! I'm delighted that most of you had a good session and are enthusiastic about the experience. A couple of you seem to have had tech issues, for others it went more smoothly - but most of you I don't know yet as you haven't posted your diaries yet - so please can you send them asap!
This week you have the readings to prepare and discuss - it probably won't take up all of the session, but it is a good idea for you to have read the texts beforehand, and make sure you understand them. Also try and think of ideas for your group based on the texts.
For those of you who are connecting from the university - the monday students for the moment have to connect from the library, the others should try Nicola Pantaleone's lab first of all, and only if there is a problem go to the library.
Enjoy this week's session and please remember to send your diaries and chats!
Francesca
WEEK 2
RispondiEliminaToday’s session began with Nahid introducing herself as our new facilitator for the rest of the program. She was really nice and tried to put us all at ease, waited for people to engage spontaneously and if they didn't she „picked a volunteer“ to keep the discussion going. (The only negative aspect is that we'll remain with one facilitator and while Nahid did a good job, alone it is not easy to understand everybody and type down everything, so there were minor misunderstandings).
We are all getting used to the camera and the micro therefore the discussion was a bit more fluent, however some people were a bit too shy to engage fully yet. This is the reason why it was mainly Nahid, Ahsan, Adam and me talking. We tried to keep the discussion going and not have long awkward pauses of silence, so we engaged a bit more but I'm sure with time the others will get involved more, we tried some „tricks“ to get them talking as to just go clockwise and not always wait for a volunteer to answer a question, give a suggestion, ask a question. It is really getting better and I'm sure we'll get soon to the point where we students interact more and don't wait for instructions from our facilitator.
So at the beginning of the session, as we were waiting for the others Nahid (F) asked us to summarize for her what we talked about last week, our expectations, concerns, getting to know each other. When most of us were online Nahid (F) introduced a game to us, she called it „Identity activity“. It basically consisted in stating 7 nouns which we consider to be the most important about ourselfes/which define best our identity. After we all had our 7 aspects about ourselves together, Nahid (F) asked us to eliminate 2 and then 2 again. So we were all left with 3 aspects we considered the most important about ourselves. I really liked the game as it was a great way to get to know each other better. I was left with „curious, European and student“. We then all shared the 7 aspects we had at the beginning and the then 3 nouns we felt described us best. In the sharing emerged that everybody (except me) had their religion and their nationality as 2 of the 3 aspects left. I was a bit astonished that all of them identified themselves so strongly with their religion and nation. And Nahid (F) also noticed that I was the only one that wasn't left with a nationality, rather I had „European“ as one of the main 3 aspects about myself left. She invited me to share my reasons to choose these 3 nouns. It was difficult to argue WHY I choose those 3 aspects about myself as most important; it came pretty naturally to eliminate the others. So my argument was based on the fact that while it took me some time to come up with 7 nouns which define me (my mind was full of adjectives), I didn't really have to think about which nouns to eliminate, as it was pretty obvious to me.
Another part of the game was to consider how you present yourself in front of others, and how this changes when the audience changes. Like the Americans defined themselves in this context of international students as Americans, but between themselves they would be more specific and name States or Cities to present themselves to others. Or how within Pakistan you strongly identify yourself with one of the 4 main languages spoken there. So we talked about different audiences on the international, national and local level. For me it was pretty hard to get away from the „European“. But as I explained that I am from Italy, that my mother tongue is German and that I grew up with both cultures close to a border, „European“ just felt right. I explained that if somebody asked me where I was from, I would say without a doubt „from Italy“, but I wouldn't define myself as Italian, nor as German or Austrian for that matter. So with that background „European“ just felt right.
EliminaAnother student (Tunisia, Muslim) stated that when he was a year abroad studying in the US he „discovered“ that the religion was the most important/most basic factor of himself. His explanations and arguments were pretty interesting and let us to the next main topic of our session.
We started talking about „Western and Muslim society/identity“ and whether we find this term adequate to use in future sessions or if we have other suggestions. So suggestions came up to actually define this terms and what we mean or associate with them and if it reflects the general definition of them. I argued that I don't think it is wrong (infact it is pretty common use in media) to put „Western“ against/with „Muslim“ identity/world/society/civilization, but that it is pretty difficult. I think that it actually complicates a discussion as the term „Western“ is based on Geography and „Muslim“ on Religion. So this terms have different „origins“ and that I think it is better to say West/East or Muslim/Christian/Buddhist/Confucian/... To explain myself better I used an example relating to the third article („Some Muslims don't get it“ by Mike Ghouse) of the reading assignments (When he talks about the reaction of Muslims to the movie „The Innocence of Muslims“ he refers to the reactions of Muslims in the MENA region mainly, yes, but also to the reaction of Muslims in America, Africa, Europe and Asia. So we went from there to agree on that based on which topic we will talk about we will (try to) adjust the terms ( to Geography, Religion, Culture; Language, …). We had a good exchange of opinions between us 3 students; it would have been nice to hear more about what the others think, or what they are used to hear/see in their surroundings.
Nahid (F) invited us to share some other thoughts on this issues, so I brought up the video „The Innocence of Muslims“ again. In preparation of the session I watched the trailer on Youtube, or better a part of it. I actually wasn't able to watch the whole 15min or so, as after 3min I had enough. I understood that Muslims feel insulted as the movie is based on all bad Muslim stereotypes in peoples’ minds. But moreover it portrayed fundamentalist Muslims as the „ordinary“ Muslims. So while I condemn the violent reactions to this movie, I can understand that many Muslims were outraged about the movie as it insulted their religion and their prophet. So I asked myself and the other students, what if the movie was about Christianity and Jesus, if it would play with all the bad stereotypes of Christians and portray them all basically as terrorists. I was wondering how Christians would react to such a movie and how their reaction would be perceived by other religious communities. In contrast to how Muslims reacted and how their reaction was perceived by other religions.
EliminaThis time not everything was written down in the chat logs, and I tried to keep personal notes of what the others said, but as I also tried to formulate my opinions, it was difficult to keep track. Next time I'll do a better job in documenting the opinions, suggestions, concerns of the others. I hope I can also portray some arguments and disagreements, as this session we just started to interact. Therefore my diary is full of my personal inputs to the discussion and is missing reactions and inputs from the other students. This is also due to the fact that we actually mainly answered Nahids (F) questions and just slowly started to interact more between us. I'm sure next week it will be better and I can fill my diary with interesting discussions and exchanges as well as my personal thoughts (or at least with more reactions to them). But it was a good session and I'm looking forward to Week 3 as we agreed to speak more about stereotypes.
Carmen
WEEK 2
RispondiEliminaMy second session took place yesterday and it was very interesting and funny, as I expected. First of all we met in a different time, nota t 13.30, but at 12.30, an hour before, because of the changing of time in some countries as Italy.
This session started in time, so we had 2 hours of conversation, even if the time was not enough in my opinion..we had no time to discuss all the articles and every thaught we wanted to share with the other students. As the facilitators told us in the emails during the week, we started with an identity activity to continue the activities of the first session so we could better know each other. There were 5 words: RELIGION, NATIONALITY, PERSONALITY, FRIENDS and FAMILY and we had to order this words from the most important for us to the least important. We were prepared for this activity, the facilitators asked us to think about it during the weeek, but it was very interesting because I could discover lots of things about other students. Of course we gave different answers and in my opinion this depend on the different cultures. For example fast all students coming from the Muslim world consider religion or nationality as something very important and essential for their life, while people coming from the West consider more important family or friends or the personality. I was a bit astonished that all of them identified themselves so strongly with their religion and nation. We had a burning exchange of opinions about the issue of religion and nation: people from the Muslim world are committed religion is the foundation of life because we need rules to live all together and so religion in necessary, but people from West have a different view. Of course we all respect other opinions, but we didn’t always agree. We discuss about what a good life is and someone said that for a happy life religion is essential, someone said that a good life depend on what you find most important.
This activity took us one hour, at the beginning it seemed to be easy and quick, but then we started to discuss about the religion, the nation, the different views and we could not stop with it, it was very interesting. It was good also because we engaged voluntary in the conversation, it was not necessary for Steve or Arwa, the facilitators, to ask us to speak or share our opinions.
This session we had a different facilitator instead of Arwa for the second part, because Arwa had some tech problems and she was not able to speak with us, so Heather joined us and together with Steve she stimolated us and led the session.
RispondiEliminaThe chat was important also in this session, sometimes there was someone who had problems with the microphone, so he could share his opinions and thaughts through the chat. And the chat is very useful because the facilitators always type and summurize everything we say, so it can be clear for everyone. It can happen that the audio is not very good, or that there are some noises, in these cases if you do not understand something you can read in the chat and you do not miss anything.
In the second part of the session we discussed about the reading we should read during the week, there was two articles: one about the coming clash of civilizations and the other one about the fredoom of speech. Then there was a video about the sources of the conflict between the West society and the Muslim society, but unfortunately we had no time to discuss about the video.
We discussed about conflicts, about the sources of the conflicts and we agreed on the fact that even if we solved some problems as for example religion issues then something else will pop up and so it’s difficult to find a solution.
In regards to the second article we talked about the Muslis religion, in fact the article was about the protest against the film “Innocence of Muslims”. Students coming from that part of the world could explained us that Islam is a peaceful religion, not how western media portrays it.
We had not much time to discuss about all these issues, but I’m sure we will have time to analyze and examine in depth these topics in next weeks.
At the end Steve wanted us to do an activity, we had to choose what we want to talk about this semester, but we were not able to do it because the poll kept desappearing from ours screens. So we used the last minutes of the session to share our opinions about the conversation, Steve asked us what had worked well and what we would like to see happen next week. We all enjoyed the session and we found it interesting because we could hear views differents form ours.
In general the session was in my opinion very good, better than the first one, there were less tech problems and we discussed about interestin global issues. The conversation was fluent and everyone was happy to share his opinions. I’m sure next sessions will be fascinating like this one and I’m looking forward to next week because we will discuss about religion and I’m interested in it..I don’t know very much about Islam so I think this experience and this discussions coul help me to discover new cultures and religions.
Marta
This week's session was amazing!
RispondiEliminaI began to realize the learning potential even before starting the session from the materials we were given to read. Among them was an extract by Samuel Huntington which startled a lot of thinking for me.
I thought that the topic of the article would have been the center of the session, but it didn't quite turn out that way...
Some people were missing, so there mostly were girls from muslim countries plus Evan (USA) and me. We started off with a “game” by which we had to list seven elements that made us who we are. We were asked to cut them down to three - only saving the most important ones to us – then commenting on our choices and how it felt to have to eliminate some.
I interpreted the game a differently from the others and listed qualities, flaws and other things that characterize me, coming down to “discover”, “help” and “rootlessness”. I stressed the fact that I consider my self more as an individual than the member of a group (family, nation...). Evan mentioned the influence of his family and his nation as part of who he is but soon eliminated religion from the list. The rest of the girls had come up with almost identical lists, dominated by religion, family and nationality and – contrarily to Evan and I – showed a lot of difficulty in having to cut out the other elements.
The conversation naturally lead to the different attitude Evan and I have toward religion. I had to the defend my position as an atheist, while the girls described the relevance they give to God as a guide of their lives. We all firmly held on to our ideas, but managed to be very civil and critic other people's ideas without judgment. Everyone participated and found something to say, so that the flow of the conversation effortlessly developed into a discussion upon the differences and the reasons of conflict between the West and the East (I was surprised to learn that the girls generally refered to “the West” as the USA only).
Only after about one hour and a half we moved on to the planned topic of the session and started to talk about the “clash of civilizations” mentioned in the article. We all agreed that people can leave peacefully together as long as there is understanding and no feelings of prevalication between them. We also agreed that the out two civilizations are heading towards a path of reciprocal knowledge which will prevent future conflicts.
At the end of the session everybody was very satisfied with how well the conversation had flourished. Now I literally can't wait for the next session and see what else I can learn!
Margherita
Hi everybody,
RispondiEliminathe session today was intense and really interesting. I love my group, a new member joined the group, a guy. The only thing I don't like and I am a bit sad if that the sound is not good enough and whom understood or facilitators didn't typing the main points of the debate, I lost important parts of it. However, I enjoyed a lot because many ideas and opinions came out. We did another game about identity and one topic we have in common in relationship with ours identities, it is so-called "Spiriatuality" or "God" or "Religion" whatever we want call it. Then, we discussed about Ethic and National Identity from our prospectives and why. The thrid part of the session was the debate about the articles. It was really interesting to see how My country and "the rest" have incredible and different meanings. For example: for americans, the rest is everybody who is not american. We talked about important influence (bad-influence) of Media (mainly in U.S.), Globalization and our interpretation of clash of civilization. The program is pretty interesting but I am not happy to discuss deeply about Politics nor Religion nor Terrorism. Next week the group will decide a topic which interested the majority to discuss together.
Week 2
RispondiEliminaMy second session took place Thursday 31 October 2013 and it was very interesting.It started in time so we had 2 hours of pleasant conversation. We talked about our identity and how we would define it in 7 aspects, we also discussed about the articles that we had to read at home.We talked about food and holidays as well.
I mentioned a holiday that we celebrate in Romania it is about Saint Nicholas. In Romania the tradition is to put cleaned and polished shoes out on a windowsill or by the door on the night of December 5. Overnight Saint Nicholas comes and places inside presents.Chocolates or other sweets,nuts , oranges or small gifts .
Then Eleonore our facilitator asked to write on a piece of paper 7 motifs,aspects that would describe ,define our identity, and to cancel some of them in order to leave only 3 . Then she put a question if we could leave only with 3 aspects?
I answered No , because I would feel incomplete ( Family, Languages and Gender) I would not be happy without the rest. I could not leave without books, friends, tea and cuisine (and that would be the rest of my list), I enjoyed the question, unfortunately I didn’t hear to many opinions my group is a bit quiet .
I mean we talk but I have this feeling that we are not vivacious as a group well enough.
We talk about Globalization and our interpretation of clash civilization, about Religion .And I express my opinions about it.
I enjoyed the session and I am confident that we gone a discover new topics to discuss.
This time I finally managed to attend the whole session! We had the possibility to speak each other about some topics even if there were technical problems again. The main topic of the session was the concept of identity: how we define it in our language and what it represents for us. The facilitators, Ibrahim and Heidi, asked us to tell 7 things, which could describe us and our identity and then think about the three most important. The great majority included religion and nationality in the three elements most important for them but me, a Korean girl and another guy. The opinions and the reflections that came out were very impressive and heterogeneous. For example, all Muslim people said that the most important thing or at least it was the second one was the religion. We spent a lot of time to express how, why and what was our thoughts about the main topic. Just in the end we started to talk about the due readings, above all about the clash of civilization. But after a few minutes the time ended.
RispondiEliminaI felt pretty confident when I spoke but unfortunately it was like if the words disappeared from my mind! What a horrible situation! I mean, I knew what I had to say but I couldn’t say that! Moreover, the audio was terrible, it didn’t help my understanding at all.
I was delighted to listen to other way of living a life from people of different countries. It’s really amazing. The knowledge of different cultures from mine makes my life more rich and meaningful.
I can’t wait for the next meeting!
Bye
Clarissa :D
My second meeting with Soliya has been absolutely interesting!
RispondiEliminaFirst of all each member of the group shared what he/she was expecting from that session, just to do some warm-ups. Of course we all thought we would discuss the articles we had to read. Still, before moving to our opinions the facilitators asked us to find some common rules which would shape our conversation.
We started by sharing an element that defines our culture and by asking our mates a question about their own culture. David, a student from the University of Padua, introduced the topic of the cultural crisis which is spreading in Europe due to multicultural societies. He was interested in finding whether this phenomenon is present also in other parts of the world. Tyler, an American guy, answered that in the USA there are clashes in policy, while Yusra, a girl from Pakistan, replied that her country is very hospital and people live peacefully with foreigners.
I replied that I believe in Italy there is a sort of return to our origins because we don’t have a strong national identity, so immigration makes us unsure. I explained that for example Christmas in Europe is a mix of old traditions. Yusra said that for Muslims Eid is the most important celebration.
Then we talked about the articles we had read at home. In particular, we discussed the terms “western”, “muslim”, “arab world”. Tyler and I agreed that American and European people share pretty much the same culture. Almost all of us agreed that the clashes between Western society and the Muslim world are due to political reasons and lack of communication.
I was so happy at the end of the session: I’ve learned something new about the Muslim world and I’ve been able to get used to the technical problems and enjoy the conversation. And yet, it was pretty difficult to share my own opinion about so profound topics, I was really afraid not to be enough prepared and informed.
For next time I am willing to deepen my knowledge by reading more articles. In this way I am sure I’ll feel more self-confident in the following discussions.
On wednesday 30 October i had the second session. It was awesome, our dialogue was fluent and we spoke a lot and about a lot of interesting issues. First we had again some technical problems but there were not as much as in the first session.
RispondiEliminaWe started the conversation speaking about the women in our communities and about their position in connection with the work.
I discovered that in Pakistan, women rarely worked. They were limited to home's work as cleaning and raising the kids.But now more of them are coming into the workforce, even if there is still now a big divide in society: the lower midle class and the upper class. There is no middle class. Upper accepts women working but lower, which represents 60% of Pakistan, don't want women working.
In Tunisia, there are no problems. Women used to be in the house but now they work also outside because of their highly education (they could work as doctors, teachers and in general women participate in all the fields). Husbands don't mind when wives go to work,on the otherwise they encourage women to work.
Then Ginney, our facilitator, gave us 5 categories: religion, natonality, family/friends, personality and favorite activities. We had to choose three of these five things that are most important in making us who we are and then we started to speak each other just to know us better. It was very funny.
Then we spoke about the freedom of speach, and it was another interesting issue. Upon that fact, i discovered that in some countries the government is corrupt and for this reason they usually deny the freedom of speach, instead in others you can speak without problems but you can't offend the fundamentalist's point of view. Those girls who live in countries with restrictions would like to live in a democracy country. But there was an exception: one girl of Jordan said "Democracy causes problems,it shouldn't be so open, you can see so many lives were kiled." I don't understant that point of view and i think that we have different opinions about the definition of democracy and i hope to deepen that issue the next session.
Cristina Leonte
My first meeting was a bit strange. Many of my group mates had many technical problems, so we did not manage to comunicate a lot, but the aim of the first meeting was getting to know each other and arrange the other meetings, and so we did.
RispondiEliminaAs I said, solving technical problems took a big part of the time, and this was a pity, but we did some nice activities to understand the other's ideas and ways of thinking.
Personaly, I was a bit shy because in the lab there were many people around me, so I did not want to bother them too much, but I still managed to talk with the others and share ideas.
I found it really difficult when I had to understand people talking in some cases because they talked with accents it was hard to catch, and the microphons did not help, but for the majority of time I managed to understand everything in a way or in another.
I felt a bit embarassed at the beginning, but I was less ashamed while time was passing.
Unfortunately, computers in the library shut all down at the same time, so I did not manage to take part on the last 15 minutes, but I was told they they finished their session earlier.
I hope that during my next session I will be able to understand more and to partecipate more. Furthermore, I hope we will be able to start some interesting debates and discussions.
I really hope next round will be even nicer and more fascinating,
Bye
Francesca Fontana
Last Thursday I had my second Soliya meeting. Unfortunately this time some technical problems ruined my session. My internet connection was very slow so, often, the videos and the audio froze, and than when they restarted, the audio was very fast and sometimes I couldn't understand anything. This made my session trying and challenging. Even if they always typed a "summary" of what someone had just said, it was difficult to keep up with the conversation, and I often lost the thread.
RispondiEliminaThe first activity was related to the readings and we stressed the differences between "Eastern World" and "Western World". We especially discussed about religion, the role of it, how important it is and so on.
Then we talked about our identity, playing a sort of game. Everyone had to think about 8 words that could describe our identity, then we had to delete 3 of them and immediately after two more. So only 3 were left and everyone had to explain them, tell which were the other 5, why we deleted them and why we kept those 3. I really enjoyed this activity even if it was hard to decide which words to delete! Anyway, thanks to this I had the opportunity to know something more about my mates.
Finally, after a poll, we had a debate on gender roles in our respective cultures. Unfortunately I had to leave 10 minutes before the end since I had to take the train to go home and I could not participate to this debate.
Anyway, I think it was an interesting meeting and we're slowly getting less shy and more confident, everyone talked and gave his/her opinion. In spite of all the problems I had, it was a great meeting, but I really hope next session will go even better, without those annoying technical problems!! Francesca B.