Puppets Up! - Creative Ways to Build Cultural Understanding

The youth exchange “Puppets Up! - Creative Ways to Build Cultural Understanding” aims to bring together 25 young people from 5 different European countries and gave them the opportunity to work together as a team in order to set up a puppets theatre made by recycled material. In an international context, participants will discover the term “theatre pedagogy” as important mechanism for teaching tolerance and respect of multicultural dimension to kids.
Through the creation of a story for the puppets theatre they will develop their artistic potential as a tool to explore the idea of tolerance and understanding of others. Puppetry has been found to be an excellent tool for the teaching of multiculturalism to children. Participants, preferably youth interested in pre-school teaching, primary school teaching, etc., will learn basic techniques used in creating live puppet theatre so they can use puppetry to incorporate multiculturalism into practice.

The project activates will be structured in 3 phases based on the elements of quality puppet theatre: Story, Design and Performance.
1. Creation of a story - multicultural/multilingual stories aimed for kids. Definition of the main characters/puppets, the sequence of the story and dialogues.
2. Creation of the theatre project – how the scenography will look like and construction of the scenography/performance.
3. Creation of the puppets/characters with recycled material.

The main goals of the project are:
• to promote group activities for spotting artistic/pedagogical potential as an important mechanism for tolerance and cultural understanding;
• to strengthen youth's intercultural competences in order to be ready for responsible understanding of Europe's identity and common values;
• to develop the European dimension through arts education and creativity with the aim to promote multiculturalism and tolerance between youth;
• To develop “Out-of-the-box” activities that will encourage mutual support, team building and group cohesion of the participants;
• Encourage personalized learning approaches by acquiring new artistic and pedagogical skills with the aim of developing new ideas and creativity of the participants involved in the project.

Through this call we invite cultural organizations developing educational programme through the arts - dance, music, theatre, visual arts, etc. - to become our partner.