<p><font color="#33711E"><strong>Day 1 – Session 2B: Creative Learning for Active Citizenship</strong></font></p>

Queen's Park 4, 16:00 - 17:30

16:00 - 16:20

2.B.1. Play Around the World: Building partnerships for development in Thailand

Jane Vallentyne, S. Truong and A. Jonzon University of Alberta, Canada

Play and recreation are identified in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, as critical to optimal human development. Play is our brain's favourite way of learning. In fact, Einstein called play the highest form of research! Play elicits joyful and creative energy, and engages our mind, body and spirit. Play Around the World (PAW) is a University of Alberta initiative that selects and prepares multi-disciplinary teams of students to provide opportunities for play and recreation in underserved communities in Thailand, particularly children who are orphaned, abandoned and people of all ages with a disability and/or HIV/AIDS. For the past seven years, teams of students have been placed in Pattaya and Chiang Mai in Thailand for three-month service-learning cross-cultural experiences. In turn, these students share their educational and creative talents with thousands of children. This paper will describe the PAW framework which is based on theories of community and international development, global education, leadership development and service learning pedagogy. The successes and challenges of this cross-cultural programme will be shared, and responses from conference participants will be welcomed.

Download the paper (pdf, 80kb) and presentation (pdf, 2.5mb)

16:20 - 16:40
2.B.2. Reinventing Arts Education: New designs for Conflict Transformation and Social Inclusion in the Multicultural School
Kjell Skyllstad
University of Oslo, Norway

At the UNESCO World Conference on Arts Education, held in Lisbon in March 2006, three Arts Education organizations, IDEA, InSEA and ISME, issued a joint declaration which recognizes "the unique role that arts education can play in the creation of a culture of peace, international understanding, social cohesion and sustainable development". The declaration sets forth a credo: "We believe that today's ... societies require citizens with ... creative ... communication skills, abilities to think critically and imaginatively, intercultural understandings and an empathic commitment to cultural diversity. Research increasingly shows that these personal attributes are acquired through the process of learning and applying artistic languages". This paper describes the three-year (1989 - 1992) Resonant Community project supported by the Norwegian Ministry of Culture and the Cultural Fund. The project was initiated in the wake of a great influx of immigrants to Norway, which resulted in a radical change in the school population in our largest cities. Under the project, which involved 720 primary school pupils of the Oslo region in an inter-cultural performing arts programme, master artists worked together with immigrant teachers. Results of a study, undertaken to determine the effect of the project on social behaviour in the multicultural schools, indicate that, in the schools participating in the project, incidents of harassment and mobbing decreased drastically, and the self-image of minority children improved.

2.B.3. Development, Heritage and Social Issues: New Challenges for Higher Education and Research
Ivo Carneiro de Sousa, Isabel Morais, and Keith Morrison
Macau Inter-University Institute, Macau SAR, China

Macao is still a very peculiar society: it is a very old Chinese town, displaying a rich and unique Southern Chinese cultural heritage, and it is at the same time the only "European" city in China. Since the handover, in 1999, ending more than four hundred years of Portuguese colonial rule, Macao has seen rapid and unprecedented economic growth. Macao today faces huge social and cultural dilemmas, in areas ranging from heritage protection to the growing gap between the very wealthy minority linked to the gaming industries and a population that is losing their traditional jobs and ways of life. In 2005, 25 of Macao's historical sites were classified as UNESCO World Heritage Sites, while other historical areas, buildings and landscapes are being lost on a daily basis. This paper discusses a new research and curricula agenda for integrating the urban space into research strategies, and for linking development, heritage, and social sustainability into course programmes. It also discusses strategies for inter-university co-operation on trans-national social issues, globalization impacts, and new social development challenges.