Hi everyone
How did your first week go? Well I hope! From those of you whose diaries I have read it seems to be going as planned- better for some than others, but no major worries!
This week you have your readings to do before the discussions, so please make sure you take the time to read them. If there's anything you don't understand about the texts please ask me.
I am sure that this week things will go more smoothly on a technical level too so you can get on with your discussions.
I will try and organise a meeting for us all next week, shall send a doodle to find the best time for you all. Can I remind those of you who didn't reply to Giulio about the lab to please do so, and also remember to post your diaries - they are essential for your assessment (and my research!). Week one diaries as comments to previous post, week 2 diaries as comments to this post! If your reflections are too long for one comment, you can split them and send two separate comments, no problem! If you want to keep them anonymou on the blog, it is possible to not have your name appear. I look forward to seeing how this week goes!
Enjoy :-)
Francesca
How did your first week go? Well I hope! From those of you whose diaries I have read it seems to be going as planned- better for some than others, but no major worries!
This week you have your readings to do before the discussions, so please make sure you take the time to read them. If there's anything you don't understand about the texts please ask me.
I am sure that this week things will go more smoothly on a technical level too so you can get on with your discussions.
I will try and organise a meeting for us all next week, shall send a doodle to find the best time for you all. Can I remind those of you who didn't reply to Giulio about the lab to please do so, and also remember to post your diaries - they are essential for your assessment (and my research!). Week one diaries as comments to previous post, week 2 diaries as comments to this post! If your reflections are too long for one comment, you can split them and send two separate comments, no problem! If you want to keep them anonymou on the blog, it is possible to not have your name appear. I look forward to seeing how this week goes!
Enjoy :-)
Francesca
On 20th March I did my second session with Soliya. I have to say that it was an extraordinary experience. At the beginning we started to talk about our day and if guys had some news; after that we entered inside conversation. First of all, Aleksandra asked us to explain to other guys, seven important aspects, which characterize our identity and personality. From my point of view, I said that I’m a talk active person because I like to talk a lot with all people, both that I know, both that I don’t know; obviously this is a quality but on the other hand I can fed-up someone, indeed in some occasion my friends told me “Matteo, stop talking!!!”. It’s funny. The second aspect is hard worker as in my life or during my university career I work a lot to achieve high results and I think that this is important also for the future when we will get a job. Then other important elements of my personality are social, creative and especially I love to do something good for the society; about this point for example I follow the policy of my country and I’m also in a political party, moreover in my city I join in different associations and I organize some social, cultural and political events. At the end I’m sporty because I care about my health, by the way this is the least important point than the others. With this activities the facilitators wanted to bring us into the principal topic of the session: the issues of global civilisation. Indeed, I don’t know how but any way we arrived to discuss about the differences between people who live in the Western part of the world and people who live in the West. During the discussion have emerged interesting opinions, and personally I talked about my witness in Bristol (UK) with girls that came from Oman. I didn’t understand the behaviour of these girls towards me. In my opinion, I think that boys and girls who live in Western, are probably more freer than the West guy because in Europe, the continent in which I live, you can touch a girl for a hug because she is your friend or you can take a pic with her, on contrary you can’t do that with an Arab girl.
RispondiEliminaAnother point that we have touched was if the Western colonialism in the Arab world played a role in present tensions. Of course the colonialism has conditioned the situation in these territories because the European Big Greats imposed their culture and their ideology, however we haven’t to forget that during the Cold War there was the presence of another actor the United States that it led a sort of neo-colonialism in the Middle East and its presence is nowadays. So maybe they want to impose in the mayor Muslim countries their plans and democracy, but I believed that you couldn’t impose democracy; This new system has to be desired by Arab people.
Unfortunately the time was over, so we couldn’t go on about the second article but next week we are going to start our session from this.
Have a nice day :)
Matteo
On Tuesday I had my second meeting. Even if unfortunately I had some technical problem (it was my fault, I didn't understand that I was obliged to use Firefox!) this time we really had the opportunity to know each other better. We weren't shy like in the first session and everyone wanted to tell something.
RispondiEliminaFirst of all we had a round of expectation about Soliya and most of all said that this is a good occasion to learn about other cultures and to make new friends; some of us would like to improve the English oral expression.
Then we talked about how we want to refer to East ( predominately Muslim Society) and the West (North America and Europe). I thought that it was an easy discussion, but I had to change my mind. Many of us said that this distinction between East and West was invented by western society, that East was a too general term to refer to so many different countries. We had a long discussion about how some words carry a negative connotation. We didn't reach an agreement, we have to think about this and we will propose a solution for the next week.
After this interesting discussion we played the “identity activity”. We were asked to choose 5 words which describe who we are; then we had to cancel two of this five elements and explain why we had done that choices. It was a very funny way to tell something about us and about who we are and what we do, our believes and our characters.
We hadn't the time to analyze the texts that we had to read, but we are going to talk about it on Tuesday
I really enjoyed the session; we talked a lot and it was really interesting to see how people from other cultures look at us and think about the way we approach to other countries (in the long discussion about the terminology “West and East” I was the only “western” student).
Furthermore yesterday I spoke with Marva, a Tunisian girl, out from Soliya, with Skype, and we really chatted a lot! Maybe I've just found a new friend!
SECOND SOLIYA MEETING
RispondiEliminaOn Tuesday, I had my second meeting. Last week I said I really want to see how this meeting would have been.
Also this time we had some connection problems initially but much less than the last time.
At the beginning, Lily and Peter, our facilitators, asked us to speak about articles we had to read at home, that were "The clash of civilization" by Samuel Huntington, and "Freedom of speech and the legitimacy of Muslim protest" by Mike Ghouse. In regard to the first reading, we talked about our idea of culture, what it means for us and which concepts this word refers to. Each of us had a different idea of culture, however, everybody thinks that is a mix of traditions, history, language and religion.
The most part of the meeting, we talked about the second topic, the freedom of speech. The group found guidelines to structure a conversation between people of different cultures in four points.
1) Be mindful and respectful of other people's culture and perspective. Think before you speak
2) Be aware that others might not be familiar with your culture and perspective. Correct misunderstandings before getting angry
3) Be open-minded and approach the conversation from a place of curiosity
4) Be humble, not arrogant or aggressive, with your own opinions
In particular, Muslim/Arabian students aren't agree with an idea supposed by a great number of Western people who wrongly sees in the major part of them terrorists or violent people.
In the end, we made a game; we had to write in a page, at first, seven things that are part of our identity; then we crossed out three of these things and later other two. Finally we read our identity characteristics and explained our choices.
This session has been better than the last one. We have broken the ice, and we spoke a lot. It was very interesting to find out different visions of the world and in particular the different point of view between Western and Arabian students. The main issue on which we focused it was the freedom of speech and the concept of diversity. Unfortunately I am the only European student in this group and so I'm the only voice "defending" the "old Country".
See you the next week; I start to enjoy soliya now!
Matteo Lasen
My dear old Diary,
RispondiEliminathis week's Soliya session was really interesting, but before telling you more, let me start with the attendance. Only three of us showed up! To make things worse, Samira (you remember Samira from Egypt, don't you?) wasn't lucky enough to have a normal internet connection during the whole time and this reduced the actual participants from three to two. If it weren't for the facilitator, the session would have been sad! Anyways the topic came in our help and saved the day. Kholoud (this soft speaking facilitator of ours) led us to the new topic of the week: Identity. Before starting our discussion Kholoud (which by the way, you pronounce "Holood", the "H" being aspired) did a very important thing. She asked us what do we feel our fears and expectations are during our interactions. The two basic fears were "not being able to speak a good English”, and “not being delicate enough when expressing our opinions”. As for the expectations I stressed out the fact that I didn't like politically correctness and wanted to be direct otherwise we wouldn't be able to talk freely and honestly. So be straight but fair. Amira agreed with me and we started.
It would have been interesting to hear as many as possible points of view in such a topic but due to many absences the discussion ended up being only among the three of us. The idea was to give a list of 6 things that better identified each of us. After that, progressively we eliminated one by one three of them. The three remaining were supposed to give an idea of who we are. The thing we stressed the most was nationality, family, traditions and religion. We found many points in common and agreed especially on the dangers of nationalism based on the European experience of the two World wars. I tried to express the importance of the EU as a regional reality that unites in diversity. Amira (the girl from Tunisia) was pleased to hear about the EU perspective. I realized that after all certain ideas aren't that hard to find a common ground, and be shared.
Five minutes before the time was up Shan appeared (Shan is the guy from Lahore, Pakistan). We didn't asked him why he was late, but most likely he must have messed up the time of attendance.
Given all the hurdles, so far I like this experience and I think that if you are lucky enough to get the right group of people you can gain a lot from it.
We'll meet next week.
Dear diary,
RispondiEliminaLast week I did my second meeting and I would definitely say that it was more and more exciting than the first one! In the first meeting there were some people missing, and we finally knew a new girl from Pakistan (if I am not wrong) that is so cool; I always tend to stereotype people from the middle east as close-minded or submissive but I changed my mind while listening to that girl. She was very friendly with all of us, she explained a lot about her culture and traditions and we learned a lot about her. The first topic of our meeting was “holidays” and we had to say at least three types of holidays we have in our culture or country and then say what is our favourite and why; it was interesting knowing that we all have not only different trends, but also different names to define holidays. There’s a Muslim holiday which is called al-adha, for example.
Secondly, we did a little summary of what we did the previous week just to remind us about the topics, and when it came out that one of the three words defining west was “junk food”, here we did a very long discussion about that: why junk food is considered a western word? Why can’t it also be an eastern word?
And finally we did an activity in which we had to write down seven words that make us who we are; the purpose of the activity was to figure out what was really important to us; in fact, we had to remove words until it remained just one. Someone said it was difficult to cut off words because it was like cutting out something part of their life essence, but it wasn’t so difficult to me because I knew I also list something that could be superficial and not compulsory to my personality.
For this week that’s all,
IV
Hi everybody!
RispondiEliminaI want to start this diary by saying that the second session was ever better than the first one!!! At first, I was a bit worried (as usual!!!) because there were only 5 of us instead of 9 and I didn't want to face embarrassing silences. However, we had so many things to say and so many questions to ask each other that the facilitator felt really sorry when she had to stop us at the end of the 2 hours. As I said, we are all very curious about each other and can't seem to learn enough about each others cultures! Our second session started with a ten-minute language learning: I taught my peers some words in Italian and Russian, the girls from Jordan taught how to say “Good morning” and “Good Evening” in Arabic and an American guy taught some Spanish (I think he is bilingual). After that, the facilitator explained the activity to do to us: we had to write down a list of 7 words that identify us, then we had to cross 4 of them out and finally we had to explain why we decided that some words were less important than the others. I was really impressed by the fact that the girls from Jordan and the facilitator put “Muslim” as their first choice, while the American students and I felt like we could cross out the word Catholic. Indeed, I found myself with a lot of things in common with the American students. I still have to understand if I have many things in common just with the American students of my group or with Americans more in general. On the other hand, I feel completely different from the girls from Jordan, but I really like them. I mean, I really want to know more about their culture and I think they want to know more about mine! For our second week we were supposed to go through some required readings: there were a lot of them, but they were so interesting that I read them all, also taking some notes. We were supposed to discuss them during the session. However, after the activity we started talking about so many other topics, that we did not even mention the readings. We will comment on them tomorrow probably. When the session was almost over, the facilitator asked us a topic we wanted to discuss during the next session. Last Thursday we talked about religion, religious holidays, the role of media and also about terrorism.
Let's see how it will go tomorrow! Really looking forward to it!
Federica Tognotti
Andrea Gallo
RispondiEliminaI am sorry if i am posting just now my diary about the second session but just now i discovered that i didn't post it yet. Fortunately i remember the most important subjects about this session so i can write now a summary about it. First this was the only session in which we had two facilitators and not just one like always, in fact there was not just Sushmita but also a french guy who helped us to understand better what all the people said during the discussion. First we started to talk about our values and the most important principles in our society: Sushmita gave us four values and we had to make like a graduation, we had to put in order the four values from the most important to the least one, and as i expected there were a lot of differences between the western guys and the guys from the Predominant muslim societies. The four values were: family, personality, religion, friends, so four very important things about our lives; i remember that i put my personality in the first position, after my family, then my friends and in the last position the religion but at the same time all the girls from the East put the religion in the first position because for them this is the most important value in their lives and actually they were a bit surprised because i put the religion in the last position; i tried to explain that the majority of the young people in my country went away from the religion and so we don't feel the religion close to us but although my explanation they were not agree with me. After this discussion in which we could see different views of our culture and our lives, we started a funny game in which we had to draw an animal with the clues that our facilitator gave us and only in the end we could show the picture of our animal. This game was meant to pay attention to the words of the facilitator and focus until the end of what she said, in fact this was an useful exercise for our discussions and our dialogues during this experience with Soliya.