Anti Bias and Intercultural Learning in Context of Youth Work and Informal Education

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Fourth Conference in Zielona Góra

From 16 to 21 March 2009 in Zielona Góra (Poland) another workshop of the series "Anti-Bias and Intercultural Learning in Context of Youth Work and Informal Education” took place. The workshop was attended by participants from Poland but also from all project partner countries, that is from Italy (bbjshare.it - Palermo), Croatia (VIMIO - Vukovar) and Germany (RAA Brandenburg - Potsdam). The main focus of the workshop was discrimination in Poland and social status of national minorities. Workshops were held in various places and institutions, both within Zielona Góra and outside the city. Participants had the opportunity to look into flavours of actions of various organizations and institutions, working to eliminate prejudice and anti-discrimination law.
An important point of the program of the organized workshop was a visit to one of the schools in Zielona Góra. This school (Zespół Szkół Ekonomicznych w Zielonej Górze) has been implementing special education programs for promoting tolerance and preventing all forms of prejudice and social exclusion for many years. Participants had the chance to make direct contact to people working in this area and participate, together with students, in selected examples of activities that are carried out every day in this school. The possibility of joint action significantly revived the group and clearly enriched experience and skills of each of us.
But the most important point of the program was participant’s visit to Nowa Sól, the town, where a large community of Polish Roma lives. This visit was a great possibility to confront problems of national minorities in Poland. It was also a chance to examine in detail examples of discrimination against Roma in Poland. However, workshop participants also learned about interesting solutions that already exist in practice, and which are aimed at integrating the Roma with the Poles and supporting Roma children in their educational career. The other part of the workshop in Zielona Góra was trainings and methodological courses according to the Anti-Bias approach improving personal skills of each participant.

The last point of the program of stay of visitors from Italy, Croatia and Germany in Zielona Góra was participating in a major conference on the issues of different kinds of discrimination. The topic of the conference was "Against the prejudices." The conference was attended not only by the project participants, but also by more than 50 other guests, mainly representatives of the local governments, or local educational authorities, employees of different organizations and institutions working to counteract to intolerance, including the media, teachers from different schools from Zielona Góra and the surrounding area and the "ordinary" city residents interested in this issue. The event was organized to present the idea of the Anti-Bias and share practical experiences from the project. In addition, during the conference several interesting papers were presented by guest lecturers, among others, from the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights in Warsow and Zielona Góra’s Association for Women "Baba". While summing up the conference and the final discussion, participants stressed very high level of presentations and the importance of discussed issues.