Global Concerns is a conference that is held once per term here at RCN. Students choose a topic and organize a day of activities, debate and workshops. Everyone must participate in organizing one Global Concern in their two years here, and this term it my time. The first thing that needed to be done was to find a theme. We had quite a bit of debate about what to do but ended up with a somewhat special model. Our theme was "Discrimination" with the four subtopics "ethnic minorities", "womens rights", "disabilities" and "religion". Each subtopic had 3-4 workshops. We decided to go for a somewhat provocative approach and made workshops with names like "Don't marry the Jew", "Don't worry, I only ran into a door" and "They see me rolin', they hatin'". We also divided all the students into different areas of the cafeteria depending on things like hair color, relationship status and whether or not they had gotten into a university yet. I actually think it worked the way we wanted. People got just a little offended, and than launched them out of their seats to take part in the debate on discrimination.
Most of my work was in a different area though. Because another thing that was special about the Global Concerns conference was that we worked together with another UWC school - In Swaziland! From the very beginning it was on our agenda that we wanted to cooperate with another school and produce something. Since I have a bit of experience with IT, I was put in charge of that part. We ended up working with UWC Waterford Kamhlaba and basically synchronizing our programs. They used our topic and subtopics and created a theme day with their own workshops, ten thousand kilometers away. All the workshops here and in Swaziland then produced material and this was uploaded to THIS BLOG by the end of the day. Working with young people like me on the other side of the planet was a lot of fun, but it was also a challenge. There are a lot of interesting things to learn about communicating and organizing projects over the internet. You can also read more about the project on the website of TALK TOGETHER, from whom we received a lot of help with exactly that.
I also had a personal project that I used the Global Concerns conference as a starting engine for. I have been puzzling for a long time with how I could do a project to make the UWC more disability friendly and that idea finally came to me when we were organizing the conference. I went to a combined school for disabled and non-disabled students a few years back and there I got to experience a lot of different perspectives on disabilities and live-study communities like the UWC schools. Now, 3 years later that gave me the idea of creating Accesibility@UWC. Accessibility @ UWC is a writing project to promote accessibility for disabled students at the United World College schools and all other live-study communities. The idea is to create a collection of articles on the issue. These articles should come from as many perspectives and have as many formats as possible. In this way, Accessibility @ UWC can be used as a database of stories and experiences from people with different lives, different roles and different opinions regarding how to create live-study communities that are accessible to disabled students. From the subtopic of disabilities, I got a lot of interesting material - Including a video of my room mate Feng from China answering the very question I am asking with the project: "What can WE do to help someone who has a disability?". You can read more about the project HERE.
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