Universal Forum of Cultures

The project "Peace maker at school" is one of the activities towards the Universal Forum of Cultures, Naples 2013. One of its purposes is educating to peace young people of all educational stages as they will be the protagonists of the Forum that will take place in Naples in 2013.

The project was conceived as a two-step project. During the first step, school teachers and professors from three Neapolitan Universities, Federico II, Suor Orsola Benincasa, and l'Orientale, worked closely together from October to December 2008 and created projects of peace education to be presented in schools. Based on the work that they do daily with their students, they designed a method to promote participation, sharing, collaboration, and cooperation in order to teach the students a higher social awareness.

The second step directly concerns the students, who will be asked to participate to the theoretical and practical activities studied during the step of co-planning. This step also includes activities outside the schools thanks to the collaboration with territorial Municipalities, educational centres, cultural and social associations, ONGs, day-care centres, and libraries.

An example of activity was the participation of teachers and students to the "marathon" of plays organized at the Theatre Mercadante, stable theatre of the city. In the context of the fourth edition of "Arrevuoto", for instance, the students of the 100 schools involved in the project spent a whole day at the theatre. Here they were welcomed by the 200 teenagers of Scampia, Ponticelli, Barra San Giovanni, and of Vomero, Montesanto and Foria districts, involved in the educational project Arrevuoto. For 2008 the project chose the title "Doppi giochi"(Double games): five shows directed by five couples of Neapolitan artists that adapted classic texts by Brecht (Mac è bello, from The Threepenny Opera, and Round Heads and Pointed Heads); Schwaez (The Dragon); Tolstoj (The Fruits of Enlightenment), and Sternheim (The Underpants).

Other examples were the projection, in the 100 schools involved in the project, of the film "Stories on Human Rights" that completes the education on human rights, and the distribution in schools of material about the Italian Constitution and its sixty years of history, which took place in the last months. Another appointment for the teachers and the students of Neapolitan schools participating in the project Peace maker at school, was their involvement in the theatre show "Vespertelli". After the staging in the Theatre Mercadante the three texts of Vespertelli became, as a matter of fact, educational material for the project. Since September 2009 the students studied the texts and the sets of these theatre works in order to become not only audience but also participants in some representations that will take place in December 2009.
Young actors and audience together to share as protagonists cultural activities for the promotion of peace and legality, on an individual, educational, and social plan.

Education