The Erasmusplus MY PEACE project aims to provide an innovative education approach to support peacebuilding through music. For the past year, project partners from six countries have worked with educators, young people and peacebuilding stakeholders to develop a series of educational resources that help achieve this aim.
This week, Denise Callan from Momentum travelled to Bordeaux with a group of 13 students from Atlantic Technical University (ATU) to join delegations from all the other participating countries for a week-long International Training Workshop in Bordeaux. This group of young people have participated in the project since March this year, attending peacebuilding through music sessions in ATU Sligo and featuring in the MY PEACE video series, which will be published shortly on the project website. In Bordeaux they joined young people from France, Germany, Bosnia Herzegovina and Ukraine. Additional Ukrainian participants, who were unable to travel, joined some of the activities online.
The International Training workshop was hosted at the Le Rocher de Palmer centre in Cenon, Bordeaux, by French project partners Le Laba and Musique de Nuit. The centre, which is home to three concert halls as well as a digital studio, meeting rooms, rehearsal spaces and a restaurant. It provided a perfect location for the young people, project team and the workshop facilitators to gather, meet, collaborate and perform.
The programme for the week began with icebreaking activities to introduce the participants to each other and to also help everyone gain an understanding of each other’s countries and experiences. A number of guest speakers attended and shared stories of the work they do, their personal experiences, the challenges they face and how their work supports peacebuilding. These included speakers from SOS Mediterranee, La Maison Ukrainienne, and a powerful performance and presentations from Palestinian musicians Majd Alnader, Sameh Abulaila and Nawras Ibrahim.
Then participants learnt of the role slavery and the slave trade played in the early prosperity and growth of Bordeaux through guided tours of the city and museum. Project partners introduced the educational resources created in the past year to the young people and educators, outlined how they might be used and received positive and valuable feedback on how they can be built on in the future.
Following these activities, the young people then participated in music workshops, facilitated by project partner MusicLab, where they collaborated to create original pieces of music, informed by their personal experiences and inspired by their experiences and what they learned during the International training.
Each student who participated was then awarded the Youthpass, a European recognition instrument for identifying and documenting learning outcomes that are acquired in projects under the Erasmus+ and the European Solidarity Corps programmes. Youthpass promotes individual reflection and awareness about learning and helps to make learning outcomes visible for the learners themselves as well as for others.
The week concluded with the entire group attending a concert performance by Ablaye Cissoko & Cyrille Brotto, currently on a worldwide tour promoting their second album. Their music is a fusion of West African and European traditions, creating a ‘luminous conversation tinged with melancholy, and poetic and intense dialogue, and a beautiful lesson in music and humanism.’ The artists generously met the group backstage and offered insights into their inspiration and collaboration.
Reflecting on the week, Denise Callan said that “it was wonderful to see the youth participants share their experiences and stories and watch how friendships developed between participants from different countries over the week. Then to hear how their experiences this week supported their collaboration and informed their songwriting at the workshops at the end of the week was fantastic. It such a validation of the work the project consortium has done to date to create tools that support peacebuilding through music for young people”
