Students Build Bridges

An online school-newspaper is nothing special these days. But once you consider that most of the students working on this paper can’t read or write, it becomes extraordinary. The motto is: “We have a lot to talk about and we will find somebody who will write it down for us.”

For over three years there has been a partnership between the Christophorus School Bonn school for physically disabled people in Germany, and the Institution for Disabled People UTAIM Centre El May Djerba, a charity association that helps handicapped children from poor families, in Tunisia.

We are teachers from each school. In the beginning our students were only pen pals, but soon we found a need for the students to get to know each other better. We began searching for a way to prepare the students for their exchange and meeting in Autumn 2005. How can they get information about their host country so that they can create a picture of culture? It’s not easy for handicapped children to remember the people they meet if the contact is infrequent. We decided to start a newspaper on the Internet because it is an easy way to publish and distribute our stories quickly. Not just that: the handling of pictures, short movies or audio files is simpler on the Internet. Though most of our students can neither read nor write, we dared to make a student newspaper – writing mail was just too difficult.

The web page consists of different categories represented by suitable symbols. To do this, the German school discussed each category and its content with Tunisia. We created layouts that were sent to Tunisia and back until we had reached an agreement. It was pretty interesting that people from Tunisia associated the same content to the symbols we used for the categories. However, we had issues in giving titles, because some had a negative connotation in Arabic or could be misunderstood. In turn, the same issue had to be addressed with the German names. In 2004, we finally presented our project to the Book Fair in Frankfurt, which was a good training for all of us. The presentation was part of the UNESCO project “Students Build Bridges.” Students write the articles, or if they can’t, a teacher or other school aide writes them down. The students also decide the subject matter, and then we search for students who can write or tell us something special about that topic.

In Tunisia they have a different process for writing articles since the number of the students who can’t read or write is much higher than the school in Germany. Even though all the students from both schools have different degrees of handicap, each one of them has individual skill or ability that lets them take part in the project. It is always nice to see how surprised they are when somebody dares them to write an article for the page, or even to decide which pictures should go with the stories.

This project is about to become an inherent part of our school, as more and more colleagues get interested in the online newspaper and support it. The students are totally down with the newspaper and read it often.

Some parts of the project are just beginning and it needs more time to develop. The most exciting thing about the page is that it is bilingual, but we still have problems with the translation due to a lack of people-power. All articles are published in both German and Arabic. Our newspaper content offers the facility to inform the students from Germany and Tunisia about their everyday, school and private life. It helps to overcome prejudices which were built up because of cultural distinctions. This medium will achieve awareness and integration. By and by, the students can participate better in layout and design. Our goal is to have a student editorial group created by next year.

Read the Online-Newspaper: http://www.afaak-horizonte.net/