Description of the challenge you will be working with and its context
Target 4.7: By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.
We want to contribute to the knowledge of Asian people's traditions, habits, ideas, feelings, and fears, as part of children's cultural education to place value on the existence of different cultures and point out the similarities of our characteristics as citizens of the same world.
To narrow the issue down and carry out a more realistic project, we have focused on Spain's Chinese community, which has highly increased in the last years, occupying, in 2020, the sixth position within the immigrant population in Spain (1).
Nowadays, we are living in a very globalize world, which entails a constant flow of people traveling and the coexistence of different cultures in the same area. Nevertheless, it is paradoxical that in the kind of world we live in, we know almost nothing about our planet neighbors. East and west populations are unaware of each other features. We have noted, for example, that in western countries many people truly believe that the entire Chinese population eats animals like dogs, insects, or rats, or that they are a very close-up society... In fact, it is a generalized belief that in many occasions is used to cause division and encourage segregation and nationalism.
Likewise, as we have discovered during the lectures of the course “Sustainability, Resilience, Ethics and Social Responsibility in Eurasia Community amidst a Global Covid Pandemic”, although we have many differences, we have more in common than we thought. That’s why we have seen the need of improving the general knowledge about Chinese people and their culture and breaking some of the stereotypes that Spanish society has about them.
In conclusion, these premises must be known by many children as possible, to create a culture of global peace, which allows us to know our cultural diversity, and most importantly, to love and welcome our similarities.
What specific measures will be implemented?
In order to achieve this goal, we have devised a two ways action plan which requires collaboration between some primary schools, the University of Burgos and the support of the Eurasia Foundation.
On one hand, we would organize some lectures about Chinese culture, history, and behavior. And on the other, we would like to edit and print short stories and/or comics, as well as develop a web application, which focuses on Chinese culture. It would also focus on some of our common features, behaviors, and ideas, to help the learners:
- Fight ignorance
- Embrace diversity.
- Understand cultural diversity as a world human heritage.
- Brake prejudices and stereotypes
- Enhance a feeling of belonging to a global community
- Verify and use reliable information sources.