After the great success of the first meeting to present the activities of the Escape2EU project, the students of ITI “Ferraris” clamored to be allowed to explore some of the aspects of the project in more detail. FTS volunteers then returned to talk about integration and travel with the students… but let’s leave it directly to them to describe what happened!
“After the first meeting with FTS volunteers, we at the ITI “Ferraris” institute, gave our willingness to meet again and carry out again activities of collecting travel testimonies with students. This time the chosen methodology was different and a questionnaire was used with 6 open-ended questions to be answered in a personal and anonymous way, thus comparable to autobiographical narrative.
Clearly, first there was the same phase of getting to know and building the working group. The writing phase took less time than the video interviews, and as soon as the first people sent in their stories, we gathered in a circle to read some of the responses in random and anonymous order.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect was just reading numerous positive travel experiences, despite the stories we often hear on television. Perhaps instances of bad coexistence between travelers and hosts are rarer than what is reported by common talk.
We seldom realize how widespread the travel and displacement of people is, and how beneficial and valuable it is as an experience.
At the end of the workshop we also had a group evaluation time and realized that we would have liked to have had more personal and intimate questions during the getting-to-know-you phase.
As a class we really enjoyed this kind of activity, also because it allowed us to experience the school environment in a different way: we realized how big and spacious our classroom is without the desks and chairs; moreover, many of us only knew the names of our classmates, and instead, from today, each of us will greet each other knowing something more about our classmates.”
