Partners meet in Wellington

European partners of the Aladdin project met once again in February, in Wellington. Welcomed by our English partners, we spent a journey as enriching as friendly. Friendly thanks to an exchange and an international cooperation in which each person could appreciate qualities of the others : thus, partners’ humour and rigour were complementary. It was enriching because everybody could describe the progress of the project within the association and share experiences, the negatives as well as the positives..We also could look forward to the next steps.

Concerning the workshops, those people who already ran the intergenerational workshops could tell the stories of the difficulties they met, give other partners some advice in order to help them to prepare the workshops to come. Regarding the next steps, we spent a moment to organise the international conference in Amsterdam in June. It will take place from 27th to 30th. We will let you know, so don’t forget to consult our website and our Facebook page in order to be informed.

This meeting gave us the opportunity to think about the collection of intercultural stories which we will write. How will we collect intercultural stories from participants? Are we looking for traditional fairy tales or personal stories? What type of questions should we ask them? Therefore, we divided into two groups so that everybody could think about the question. From the word “culture”, we extracted the following words : “ancestors”, “identity”, “shock”, “traditions”, “values”. These last ones encouraged us to formulate questions related to stereotypes, cultural codes, food, rules, language, misunderstandings…Considering these reflections, we suggested different questions to ask in order to persuade participants to share intercultural stories, such as “what is your favourite tradition in your family?”, “who is your hero who inspires you?”. The answers will give the opportunity for the participants to exchange orally intercultural stories which may be personal as well as traditional. We eventually decided to keep this following question : “Can you recall a story a grandparent used to tell you when you were young?” Thus, the answer to the question can be a fairy tale as well as an historical story or a personal anecdote…what ever form it takes, each intergenerational and intercultural story will be enriching and diverse.

We managed to come to an agreement during this activity on what we expected from this collection of intercultural stories…We are looking forward to collect stories shared orally by our seniors and our young adults!

This meeting in Wellington happened so fast…but fortunately, we will meet very soon in Amsterdam in June, hoping that we will be as many as possible!