| Task 2 Evaluation |
| Task: | To produce a contribution on the subject "Friendship" |
| Main focus of contents: | Practical methods which bring different cultures together |
After our experience with the task "School News" we considered how to deal with the elements which had created distance. "Friendship" was the suggestion for a new subject. We consciously left the concept of News and the presentation of the school and the pupils. We wanted the new task to be more personal and more individual, with less possibility to create simplified generalisations ("that's how it is in England .."). Furthermore we decided to edit the contributions into one programme to emphasize again our common interest.
It was also important to us that the process of media production continued. One pupil commented "Yes, but if there is a second time I can be even better." If we want that pupils can deal competently with media messages they need to have more than one chance at production. Only through repeating the process can a competent, reflective attitude develop towards ones own media texts (and hopefully in the long term to those of others).
Due to the varying summer holidays the time given for the second task was very short and therefore less structured. Nevertheless it was possible to produce a programme of 12 minutes with contributions from each country. Additionally there were two short contributions from a primary school in Israel. This proved to expand the project partners' horizon (the contents of the programme can be seen as a storyboard in the internet).
The partner classes designed the task differently. Each class used short interviews on subjects related to friendship ("What is friendship?", "who is your best friend?", .). The next step were some sketches which representing situations involved in friendship (trust, finding friends, .). Pupils from the Spanish class also showed friendship visually: playing together, football, dancing. These uncommented pictures worked especially strongly.
Small screenshots of each participating pupil were combined into an introduction and also all the names of the pupils were inserted at the end as credits (the names from the different classes being mixed up). This was to reinforce the common identity of the programme through the editing.
Only after the summer holidays were we able to evaluate the programmes. We realised quickly that the method of using a common programme and the subject we had chosen came nearer to our goals. Other people not involved in the project also confirmed this. We were surprised how much a common identity of the whole group was created through editing the contributions together.
We think that the subject "friendship" offers more potential. The subject "friendship in the media" for example was taken up only by the class in Berlin. Maybe it is possible to return to that later.
