Exhibitions

Creative Education

From Jun 25 to Jun 30, 2012
9:00am -> 8:00pm
Beirut Design Week 2012

Ministry of Tourism

In this changing country that is Lebanon, creative and inspiring education is key. By enabling educators to teach analytical methods, students can learn autonomy from an early age. The Creative Education team explores this vision in the context of the Paradis d’Enfant school, an NGO created in 1997 when public schools had to face big administrative problems after thirty years of war and families could not provide costly private education for their children. We work on the difficult transition between the playful freedom of the pre-school classes and the more structured primary school environment. Through small creative activities we investigated the reasons why children entering primary school get agitated and easily loose concentration. By sitting among them in class we initiated debates to make them start thinking about how they feel in class and what are their interests. We finally decided to focus on the Arabic language, which they find hard to learn because it is much different from the one they speak at home. We work both on the methodology of teaching and on the classroom space to create an environment that facilitates an interactive learning experience.

“DESMEEM: Rethinking Design through Cross-Cultural Collaboration” is an international multidisciplinary social design project that has been developed in Beirut for the past few months with European and Lebanese designers and architects. As a research-led initiative, all the projects revolve around themes that are of high social or environmental significance to Lebanon. These include urban space, energy/electricity, sustainable consumerism, creative education, disability, migrant workers integration, personal finance, and gender/LGBT rights. This project is one of the eight that was created by this process.