As part of the project “NEAR – NEwly ARrived in a common home”, AIDGLOBAL, in partnership with the Alto do Lumiar Elementary School, held between April 27th and 28th an educational itinerary called "Route of the 5 senses through urban art" which aimed to provide a set of diversified experiences that allowed students to get to know better the geographic area where they live.
Valuing art as a form of expression, identity construction, overcoming inequalities and citizenship was the incentive to bring together 9th grade classes B and C and 6th grade classes B and D to take them to explore more deeply their relation with the territory where they live, in collaboration with classmates from different cultures. The youngsters were invited to reflect on different cultural themes, awakening their 5 sensorial receptors as a way to approach cultural expression in each place they visited.
This initiative had the support of teachers who were available to accompany the classes on a multisensory experience around the world, in which each place selected for the visit corresponded to Touch, Taste, Hearing, Smell, and Sight.
The Quinta das Conchas e dos Lilases Park was the first starting point of this adventure, which gave the students an opportunity to exchange the traditional teaching model between four walls for the freedom of a "classroom" in the midst of nature. There, they explored the first area of the itinerary, Vision, which led them to discover images referring to the intercultural diversity of different countries and their respective artists that were exhibited in various places of the Park.
The second place visited, devoted to Taste, gave them the opportunity to get to know different Tastes of the world and where each class elected a classmate to taste a certain food product, identify it, and discover its origin.
Next, the classes went to the third space to experience Tact, at the Quinta das Conchas Skatepark, using their imagination by touching the plasticine to recreate one of the images represented in the graffiti. Stimulating their artistic side resulted in increased self-confidence and self-esteem.
In the same place, they were able to identify and guess the origin of various spices, just by Smell.
Finally, the tour ended with Listening, responsible for the discrimination of several sound waves, allowing them to identify the sounds around them. There, the youngsters, having as reference the graffiti represented in the mural in front of the Quinta das Conchas Skatepark, were challenged to participate in a musical Quiz, testing and expanding their knowledge about the musical diversity existing in the world.
Recognizing that children and young people are subjects and agents of the educational process allowed not only to stimulate their natural curiosity and desire to know and understand the why of things, through opportunities to deepen what they already know, but also through contact with new realities that aroused the interest to explore and discover that teamwork and respect for diversity is fundamental to the education and inclusion of children and young people, in favor of building a fairer and more inclusive world.
In the evaluation made after these two days of heartfelt complexity and discovery of the territory where they live, the students praised and thanked the way the initiative was conducted, bringing them closer to different cultural realities.
“NEAR – NEwly ARrived in a common home” is a European project funded by the European Commission, under the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) with the ISMU Foundation as a promoter and as partner entities Tamat, CARDET, and AIDGLOBAL and the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. In Portugal, this project is being developed in the city of Lisbon, namely in the Bairro das Galinheiras, located in the parish of Santa Clara.
AIDGLOBAL ― Acção e Integração para o Desenvolvimento Global (AIDGLOBAL ― Action and Integration for Global Development) is a non-profit Non-Governmental Organization for Development (NGDO), which develops and promotes projects within the scope of Education for Development and Global Citizenship in Portugal and programs within the scope of Literacy in Mozambique. Its Mission aims to Act, Include and Develop through Education, because it believes that Change happens through Education.
