One World in Schools

The continuous education programme One World in Schools (Jeden svět na školách), which is an integral part of the One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, is celebrating the first decade of its existence this year.

In the course of the One World festival, we organise film screenings for primary and secondary schools every year. These are held in all the towns and cities where the festival takes place. This year, the films for schools have also been selected with respect to various age brackets. Shorter films from the One World for Children category are intended for younger audiences. This year, these films will deal with topics such as child labour, the environment, poverty, and living with disability. The One World for Students category is intended for older pupils and secondary school students. In this festival sidebar, we regularly present films on topical subjects. This year, for example, we cover non-democratic regimes, sport as an alternative leisure activity for teenagers, the environment, and HIV/AIDS. For the fifth year, films from this category will be judged by a student jury. Last year, the festival’s school screenings were attended by 48,000 viewers.

One World in Schools, however, does not come to an end with the festival’s closing ceremony. We provide primary schools, secondary schools and faculties of education with documentary films throughout the year. Our materials are currently being used by teachers at more than 2,800 schools, i.e. more than half of all schools in the Czech Republic. These materials primarily comprise sets of documentary films or other audiovisual resources and accompanying materials, which teachers most frequently use as in civics, basic social science and history lessons, as well as for so-called interdisciplinary subjects. Our experiences have shown that documentary films and other audiovisual materials are extraordinarily suitable for initiating debate, and they help people form their own attitudes and opinions. They teach young people to think critically and to seek the proper contexts for information.

Besides these materials, we regularly prepare a number of events for teachers and pupils during the school year. This includes seminars at which teachers learn how to work with audiovisual materials in lessons. Over 10 years, we have organised 69 seminars, which have been attended by more than 1,400 teachers. Specialist conferences are another example of our activity. One of the accompanying events of this year’s festival is a two-day conference focusing on the use of documentary films in global-development education and lessons on communist totalitarianism in Europe.

With the Stories of Injustice project, we have been devoted to the subject of modern history for a long time. Now in its seventh year, we pursue this endeavour to try and acquaint pupils and students with our country’s post-war era, using film screenings followed by talks with people who lived through the events in question or historians. The screenings and accompanying discussions are always held directly in schools during the month of November. Last year, screenings were held in more than 700 schools, and these were attended by almost 20,000 pupils.

Ever since the inception of One World in Schools, we have also worked directly with young people. Secondary school pupils establish One World in Schools Student Film Clubs on their own initiative. At present, there are 55 active clubs in the Czech Republic. More than a hundred students are involved in the organisation of these clubs, and we have arranged a meeting for them during this year’s festival. This is now a traditional part of the event. Besides sharing their experiences, we have also prepared a programme for them, including workshops, screenings of documentary films and discussions with interesting guests.