Schools get involved and further courses of the project already planned.
The GTO has been working with five Berlin schools to carry out our „Klobalisierte Welt” project. The schools are located in the districts of Buckow, Dahlem, Lichtenrade, Reinickendorf and Wilmersdorf, and amongst them we're lucky enough to have one of the six model comprehensive schools in Germany and also a German-Polish European school. Pupils from the 8th and 9th grades (approximately 13 to 16 years old) are taking part.
In the school year of 2009/2010, the project was continued with a pre-inspection of the toilets, followed by a day-long workshop and by ongoing presentations by the pupils up until World Toilet Day on Nov. 19th, 2009, when the schools had come together to do a joint public presentation and a demonstration in Berlin.
The inspection of the German school toilets as part of the "Klobalisierte Welt" ("Toiletised World") project was one topic of an article published in the June edition (2010) of the US magazine "School - Planing & Management". Tom Keating, an experte to school toilets, who also accompanied us during the inspections of the school toilets in Berlin, states in this article that the problems with school toilets are the same in the US and the countries of the European Union - as well is the solution. You find the article here.
”Klobalisierte Welt“ (“Toiletised World”) is a school project that we run in Berlin. The project’s main purpose is to get students (13 to 16 years old) to think about the importance of good cooperation in order to successfully realise projects, and in particular the importance of engaging all stakeholders early on in the process. Within this framework, the pupils work to address sanitation problems in their own school, and in doing so learn about the importance of basic sanitation as well as developing their collaborative and presentational skills.
“Klobalisierte Welt” consists of the following elements:
- a one-day workshop (which takes place in the school) – led by the school-teacher(s) and GTO-speakers
- a presentation by the pupils
- a joint public presentation in Berlin on World Toilet Day (WTD - Nov. 19th).
Throughout the project the schools are supported by the GTO in the form of expertise, teaching materials and contacts.
The workshop’s dual educational aims are to give pupils a basic understanding of:
- Development cooperation, especially the importance of taking a participatory approach, drawing on the parallels between projects in development cooperation and at their own school
- The importance of basic sanitation, the global sanitary crisis, the sanitary situation in Germany, technological solutions worldwide, and the overwhelming importance of finding sustainable solutions
In addition to providing (theoretical) information, there is also a hands-on side to the project, including an inspection of the school toilets. This allows pupils to bring their learning from development cooperation and sanitation into a more practical context.
In the weeks following the workshop, the pupils are asked to pull together their learning and make a presentation in a media of their choice: articles, plastic arts, audio or video pieces, press conference etc. In doing so the students are able to build on the raw information that they've been handed and transform it into an interactive process that really makes it real for those involved. At the same time, the projects succeed in highlighting both the importance of good sanitation generally and more specifically the circumstances in their own school.
The project is funded by InWEnt gGmbH (www.inwent.org) with finance from BMZ, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (www.bmz.de).
View/ download the project description as pdf-document (31 kB).