On October 16, 2023, Mgr. Ľubica Durcová from Gymnázium in Myjava, Slovakia, led an interdisciplinary workshop on the topic of Comics. The workshop was aimed to make the students see the appeal of telling stories in picture form, to teach them the history of the medium and how it adapted through time to serve the needs of the readers, and it paid special attention to superhero characters.

The workshop consisted of numerous discussions and activities related to specific superheroes, examples of picture stories ranging from Ancient Greece to contemporary memes and humor, and films based on comic books. As a final activity, the students were tasked with making their own short comics in groups and presenting it to their classmates, exercising both their creative and cooperative skills.

On Thursday, 28 September, we had two online workshops led by professor Fella Benabed from Badji Mokhtar - Annaba University, Algeria. The workshops were focused on two human rights activists, and were titled Nelson Mandela: The Hero Within and Malala Yousafzai: Empowerment through education.

The first workshop presented the South African activist and politician Nelson Mandela through the concept of PsyCap, defined as an individual’s positive state of development, consisting of four elements: hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism, commonly abbreviated as HERO. The students were made familiar with how these qualities manifested in Mandela’s actions throughout his political life, and were then encouraged to identify and discuss how these qualities relate to specific quotes by Mandela.

The second workshop discussed the Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai. The students were introduced to the various factors that prevent girls across the world from accessing formal schooling, to Malala’s story, and her mission to fight for equal rights and to education for all children. The students discussed the advantages that female empowerment through education has on society, and after reading a summary of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they were tasked to consider how they, as individuals, can contribute to the ideals the Declaration represents in their daily lives and in their communities.

Professor Fella Benabed of Badji Mokhtar - Annaba University, Algeria, led two online workshops on June 20, 2023, titled Heal the Planet through Art and Be a Colibri: The importance of Nature Conservation. Both workshops focused on issues related to nature conservation and climate change, connecting the subjects of art, culture, and civic education.

The first workshop worked with Fabrice Monteiro’s "The Prophecy" photographs and Michael Jackson’s "Earth Song", while the second used Conservation International’s "Mother Nature" video and the indigenous peoples’ Colibri legend. Through a series of communicative tasks, the participants discussed the role of art in raising awareness about nature conservation and climate change, the importance of them in their lives, and how human activity impacts the climate. The workshop also helped them reflect on their own personal responsibility in preserving nature and reducing the pace of climate change, and to identify different strategies that will enable them to do so.

On June 20, 2023, Mgr. Diana Magátová from Gymnázium Myjava, Slovakia, led a workshop titled Rip van Winkle and American Revolution. The workshop started with a warm-up activity, in which students created short poems in teams. To show how history and each author’s experiences influence literature and how art mirrors reality, the discussion moved to analyzing Washington Irving’s Rip van Winkle and the key terms surrounding the American Revolution. The students worked directly with the literary text, analyzing its themes and ideas and looking for any similarities between the text and real historical events. Afterwards, they created posters representing the world of Rip van Winkle.

On May 25, 2023, Mgr. Miron Breznočšák from Gymnázium Andreja Kmeťa, Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia, led an online workshop titled Model Activities on the Subject Regional History and Education. He presented model activities for an interdisciplinary school subject of Regional Education and focused on how any town or a region might serve as a model of microhistory, using the town of Banská Štiavnica as an example, introducing its heritage, history, and traditions. Both the workshop and the Regional Education subject showed the applicability and variability of the presented methods for different periods and environments, fields of studies, and different types of learners.

A workshop titled Film Soundtracks, led by Mgr. Ľubica Durcová from Gymnázium Myjava, Slovakia, took place on May 24, 2023. The students were introduced to the history of music in film, how this music is used to manipulate our emotions, and how different film genres use different types of sound.

The students first listened to specific scores from popular films, in pairs and then in groups,  trying to identify what film the music was from and discussing what type of emotion it seeks to elicit. This was followed by a discussion of the students' own favorite film soundtracks, making lists of them in groups and creating posters for concerts consisting of those tracks, exercising both their knowledge of films and their creativity.

On May 24, 2023, Mgr. Alena Cilíková from Gymnázium Myjava led a Student Parliament Elections workshop, connected to the subject of Civic education. The students first discussed the role of the Student Parliament, before proceeding to activities connected with the election itself.

The students were separated into several groups, each tasked with forming their own political parties and each picking their speaker, then preparing a poster introducing their policies. One group formed the Election Committee and prepared the ballot box and all the papers. After preparing their campaigns and giving their voting speeches, the students experienced simulated elections and after counting the votes, the official winner was announced. The workshop helped foster the students’ creative and communicative skills, as well as teaching them civic responsibility.

The first in our series of workshops, titled The Healing Power of the Word, took place online on March 21, 2023, coinciding with the International Poetry Day as well as International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. It was led by professor Fella Benabed from Badji Mokhtar - Annaba University, Algeria, and focused on the concepts of psychological resilience and coping skills, empathy, building the students’ racial tolerance and their teamwork skills through various activities. These were centered on Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise”, IFAD’s video "This Is How We Rise", and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

Maya Angelou’s poem as well as IFAD’s video and the subsequent discussions introduced the participants to the issues of discrimination and women’s empowerment, while the discussions around MLK’s speech focused on the Civil Rights movement. Other activities focused on fostering the students’ yearning for justice and equality, and the final assignment concerned their self-actualization.