Last week the photographers of Molo7, Ilenia Piccioni and Antonio Tiso, have taken part in a workshop of digital story telling within the frame of the European Project Shape the change. We spent five great days in Liège (Belgium) as representatives of Upter Solidarity.

The other partners who participated in the meeting in Liège were different types of Associations who share common values and gather the project: Perspectives (Belgium), Syndicat de l’Education Populaire (France), A.C.L.I. (Italy), Agrupamento de Escolas de Penacova – Centro Novas Oportunidades de Penacova (Portugal), Roots (Ireland), Trames (Italy) and Ecorys (UK).

We publish a short extract of this interesting project and some portraits of participants to the workshop in digital story telling in Liège.

“In Europe citizens are nowadays increasingly called on to take responsibilities and to be involved in social change, as well as facing different problems such as discrimination, unemployment, violence, environmental issues, ignorance, social injustice, gender problems, etc.

Shape the change is a project particularly aimed to enhance the function of informal education while promoting individual and social change, creating social strategies and projects in co-operation with other subjects. Our vision is that learning how to change will lead us to a society’s transformation which will allow us to live together in harmony. This project works on this issue through the use of different forms of autobiographical methodologies. In fact, people working in the social change and active citizenship very often need to tell their own stories because they would like:

– to reflect on their own experiences and make visible all the implicit learnings, knowledge and beliefs;

– to communicate and involve in social action more people as possible;

– to share methodologies, strategies, skills, knowledge with both inviduals and organizations in order to make the citizens participation more efficient.

Furthermore we think that sharing, at a European level, good practices and points of views will permit us to improve the rule of informal education in active citizenship, in the different partner organizations and in all those European contexts where they work.

We make use of a participative methodology which makes people active in the social change in their own life. In fact we believe that it’s very important to amplify the means of personal expressions, in order to involve more people as possible, groups and organizations in the social change process and active citizenship.

All partners will contribute to the project with suggestions, ideas, integrations. We will spread collected experiences through the use of different methodologies such as digital technologies, “traditional” writing, etc. The participant partners will produce stories in different format. Storytelling is a kind of self-learning method which allows the coming out and the valorisation of implicit skills that will become transferable and could be promoted in other social contexts.

The stories produced through the different methodologies and means (video, text, photo, audio) will be visible on the web thanks to a digital archive.”