Sunday 19/02/2012

Today JECI-MIEC Europe launched its Study Session “Creating empowered Students in Human Rights through Integral Education” in the European Youth Centre in Strasbourg, France. In the evening almost everybody had arrived. We had our dinner, celebrated the Holy Mass to thank God for the meal He provided and then we gathered to get to know each other and to express our expectations for this Study Session. After all this, we played group building games in a spirit of joyfulness and happiness. 🙂

Monday 20/02/2012

In the morning we had the official opening of the Study Session and the introduction to the major themes of the session. Through playing games we discovered the different situations of Human Rights. Then we split into groups and we designed a newspaper cover about the realities of Human Rights all over Europe. In the night we listened to the presentations by the members of JECI-MIEC and members from other external organizations and visited their “exhibitions” in a “museum”.

Tuesday 21/02/2012

The day began with a video clip on what we mean by the term ?education? and then we discussed the field of Integral Education. Later, we were divided into groups and shared experience of Integral Education and thoughts upon the use of this kind of education in general. After two input sessions by Mourad Mahidi from the European Youth Forum and Rui Gomes, the Head of the Education and Training Division the evening programme aimed at analysing the problems and issues raised by the lecturers by the method of the “problem tree”. Right now we are launching the Multicultural Evening – a great opportunity for Intercultural Learning Experience!

Wednesday 22/02/2012

After a presentation of the “problem trees” of the previous day including possible solutions everyone was invited to join one of the following workshops related to Human Rights:

–          discrimination,

–          education as a Human Right

–          evolution of Human Rights,

–          Human Rights and human dignity,

–          Human Rights, religious freedom and interreligious dialogue.

After a mid-term evaluation and the lunch we all gathered to do a joint visit at the Council of Europe main buildings. There we received a valuable introduction from experts of the Human Rights and the CoE institutions.

After the free afternoon some of us went to the Ash-Wednesday mass jointly until we all met again at a nice restaurant where we had the typical local dish “tarte flambée”.

Thursday 23/02/2012

The day began with a morning prayer. Then we were given the European and International conventions on Human Rights and were divided into groups in order to deepen our understandings of the conventions. Later, every group was given a case from the European Court of Human Rights and was asked to identify the violated articles of the conventions and propose possible actions from the Non Governmental Organizations. In the afternoon we were asked to write what rights we felt were the most important from everything we discussed so far. Then we wrote down some problems we noticed in our home or other countries and were again put into groups to discuss possible actions to solve these problems. For the evening we had a fun and successful party.

Friday 24/02/2012

The day began with our morning prayer. After that, we learnt about what Advocacy is; we were divided once again into groups, and we started preparing ourselves to act upon Human Rights’ Advocacy. Then we had three different workshops we could attend. Those were Project Management, Human Rights Education and Media and Human Rights. In the afternoon the European Youth Foundation presented itself to us. Later we started preparing for the action part by putting all of our individual cases together and found a common ground to work upon through the method of See-Judge-Act. For the evening, we prayed to God to help the people in need and then we participated in group games.

Saturday 25/02/2012

Today was the final day of the study session “Creating empowered students on Human Rights through Integral Education”. The day began with a Holy Mass. Afterwards we presented our individual action plans and had short presentations of the CoE’s and JECI-MIEC’s future plans. After lunch we were divided into groups to talk about what we are going to bring to our national organizations and we discussed possible partnerships with other NGO’s. After a short break, we were asked to write a letter to ourselves about the impact of the study session on us and about how we imagined ourselves in one year from now. Later we had the evaluation of the whole study session and the evening prayer. The evening ended with the closing ceremony and the farewell-party.