The PACE Project:
A teacher’s experience
The PACE project, initiated by the United World College of the Adriatic, aims to harness the power of education in the process of rebuilding post conflict societies facing the challenges of social and cultural change. Led by the College, the PACE project is being developed in collaboration with a wide range partners throughout the Adriatic region – in Italy, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro. Naturally, teachers are central to such an ambitious undertaking.

PACE teachers are committed to finding ways of fulfilling the PACE project objectives within the framework of their own school curriculum.  Several teachers from different countries and diverse educational systems have already benefited from the first in a series of demanding professional workshops.
 

Dzenan Hakalovic, one of three teachers from Bosnia and Herzegovina, has been involved in the PACE project since the first workshop in Rijeka.  Dzenan was an excellent choice for the project in terms of his background and passion for teaching.  

A history specialist, Dzenan met and began working with the other teachers in his group, each from a different subject area – literature and art, economics and world cultures. After studying examples of best practice and sharing fascinating insights into the different educational systems represented, the teachers found common ground and a unifying image in the metaphor of the “Six Blind Men and the Elephant”. This metaphor drove and permeated all the subject exemplar material created within the general humanities theme: Culture and Cultural Interaction.

Dzenan’s own exemplar material focussed on ‘World War I and the Interaction of Cultures’, using the elephant as a metaphor for World War I and the six blind men as a metaphor for the conflicting perspectives of the six major powers involved. With the help of other members of his group he developed a scheme of work within the context of agreed PACE Core Beliefs and Common Strategies

Attending school in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war gave Dzenan a strong sense of what he most valued from his own education and a deeply felt mission towards specific educational reforms. This experience and appreciation is enormously valuable for the PACE project. In his primary school years Dzenan had to contend with shattered school buildings and a lack of basic provisions, and yet he says, “Those harsh times were also a chance for me to get an insight into the beauty of teaching.” He was aware that the teachers helped the pupils deal with the “horrible reality of the war” and “therefore they helped us survive”.

The potential impact of education on children had been powerfully felt by the time Dzenan moved to secondary school.  An experimental school set up in Sarajevo, a joint project of the Bosnian and Herzegovinan and Turkish governments, gave him first-hand experience of successful collaboration between his homeland and a neighbouring country. As a boarder, Dzenan encountered pupils from diverse backgrounds and benefited greatly from the emphasis given to non-academic activities and opportunities for sharing duties, ideas and responsibilities. Still in touch with friends from home attending traditional national schools, he knew that he was receiving ‘more’ than his peers and saw how much everybody could have gained from such broader educational initiatives. In retrospect, he understands that, in common with his friends from home, he did not experience the open communication between students and teachers that he now sees as desirable, what he calls the “more subtle pedagogical and psychological approach”.  Dzenan also longed for a more interactive approach as a way of avoiding boredom and inattention.

After secondary school Dzenan joined the Faculty of  Philosophy at the University of Sarajevo, majoring in History. Although ‘The atmosphere among the students was fantastic and the university programme built upon the strong foundations already gained’, he regretted the lack of opportunity for specialisation.

The PACE project promotes the initiatives that Dzenan so appreciated in his own education and seeks to respond to some of the gaps he identified. He is about to become a teacher in a Bosnian school and, by piloting the materials he made in the workshop, will be supported in tailoring education to the needs of his students within their cultural and social context.
 

Paul Regan, the Headmaster of Dzenan’s new school, United World College in Mostar,  says, “I am particularly moved by the requirement that we train and nurture local teachers and that in time it is they who will carry the torch”. Dzenan is well placed to do just this.

The workshops are ‘different’. They break the ‘traditional’ workshop mould. Preconceptions may not apply. The structure is flexible. Teachers themselves are the main players, the acknowledged experts, given the opportunity to explore and consider new ways of delivering their curricula. This requires an open, even risk-taking approach – being willing to ‘think outside the box’ and to use initiative in delivering the workshop goals, with ‘a little help from friends’ in the Big Idea groups. The emphasis in the first two workshops will be on the creation of didactic materials by individual teachers. These innovative materials will be uploaded to a virtual working space and piloted in the teachers’ own schools. Teachers will primarily be uploaders rather than downloaders. The interaction between teachers in the Big Idea groups will stimulate and support the creation of materials. Implicit in the process is reflection on both the underlying values of the teaching materials and the human qualities we wish to cultivate.