In the Czech Republic, they decided to tell schoolchildren about the refugee problem using a comic.
As Radio Prague reports, the author of the Hello Czech Republic project is a local non-governmental organization META, which is mainly engaged in the education of foreigners wishing to assimilate in the Czech Republic. The project has caused a great public resonance, and not all reviews are positive.
“We implemented the Hello Czech Republic project last year after winning a competition announced by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to create these educational materials and teaching aids in Czech. Among them is a comic telling the fate of a real character, an Afghan boy who fled to Europe, and a film Shadi about a girl from Kurdistan whom her mother sent to Sweden – this is also a story based on real events.
The teacher's manual consists of thirteen chapters, two of which are devoted to the above-mentioned comic and film, and the rest are designed to help teachers in discussing topics already included in the general education system – such as 'self-determination', 'fear', 'prejudice'. Some of them directly concern issues of migration and integration,” said Zuzana Vodňanská, director of the META organization, to Radio Prague.
Next, the Hello Czech Republic project tries to make Czech students imagine themselves in the place of refugees. They are presented with a fictional story, the plot of which is as follows: as a result of a nuclear disaster, ten million Czechs are forced to leave their homeland. The only country in the world ready to offer them asylum is 300-million-strong Peacestan in Asia (Peacestan, from English 'peace' – note by editor), but locals protest against the influx of Czechs into their country.
Real Czech schoolchildren, according to the authors of the textbook, after reading the text must formulate answers to difficult questions: for example, what is the identity of Czech culture, what religion would they like to practice in the new country, would they like to have the right to vote in elections, do they intend to observe local traditions. It is this part of the project, presented in the media, that sparked protests from parents who did not want to subject their children to such experiments.
“Those who called the ministry in response to the information that appeared in the media demanded, first of all, more detailed information on this issue,” said Jarmila Balážová, spokesperson for the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic. “They were interested in how much the ministry itself was involved in the project. At the same time, they expressed their disagreement with the mandatory discussion of migration issues by all schoolchildren, since the media did not specify for which educational institutions the manual is intended.”
According to Jarmila Balážová, the ministry is preparing some strategic document that teachers can use when including such topics in the curriculum, but, according to the law, the ministry cannot tell schools which textbooks to use and which not. “This manual does not aim to tell children what they should think about refugees. It is designed to make life easier for teachers when discussing such issues. The teachers themselves positively assess that the textbook has many exercises that help start a discussion in the class, promote children's skills to defend their point of view, independently search for information on this issue. The textbook is neutral, it does not try to convince anyone of anything.”
Zuzana Vodňanská explains how the set of educational materials and teaching aids, freely available on the META organization's website, was created. “A working group of six secondary school teachers was created, who tested the educational material and the proposed teaching methodology in their classes. Based on their experience, we removed from the final version of the textbook some exercises that were proposed in the original Swedish manual, others were modified. That is, we adapted the proposed material to Czech conditions – it is not just a translation of the textbook, but its adaptation. Subsequently, we organized a workshop for a wider circle of teachers, who also had the opportunity to use the materials in their lessons, and the feedback from them was positive,” said Zuzana Vodňanská.
The President of the Czech Republic Miloš Zeman also spoke sharply on this issue, who on the television channel Prima called the Hello Czech Republic campaign “another idiotic project of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.” “It is as naive as Bolshevik propaganda, which, although not presented in the form of a comic, was essentially just as stupid,” the head of state believes.