WEs we like - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 18:55 - 0 Comments

What they don’t teach you in classrooms

With my 2 colleagues Bea and Dominik, I went to Ben Gurion University in mid September. Our goal: To produce a video – together with the students – telling the story of the open apartments program of Ben Gurion. (see previous blogposts as well). This program is really unique – in no other university (worldwide) anything like this happens. The university offers students apartments for free. They live in poor communities in Beer Sheva and in exchange they have to work for 8 hours/week in community programs, such as teaching elder people to read and write, play soccer with kids, practice gym with women, let abundant lofts begin to flourish … The results are convincing: the barriers between the poor population and the university are breaking down, the people realize that education isn’t only something for the rich, and a true integration of the students within the community happens. And for the student’s benefits: they really learn lessons for their lifes. For further explanation regarding the program watch this video. I conducted it a year ago with Vered Sarussi, the lady running the department.

At Beer Sheva we worked with 7 students participating in the open apartments program – none of them ever had anything to do with video before. In 2.5 days – during a design thinking workshop – we developed an entire storyboard: Text, pictures, scenes, locations, music … everything was precisely planned and documented and we wre ready to shoot;-) In a tight schedule we did the video footage in one day … everybody went out and did its particular part. After another day and a half editing we are all very proud to show this video to the world;-)

It’s core message: Community involvement is something you don’t learn in the classroom!

And here is the documentation of the entire process – presentetd in a easy to understand way. I think it’s fun reading.

Thanks again to Anne Berkeley and her colleagues at Ben Gurion University who made this possible!