Rohingya Culture and Traditions ( Part 2 of 8)

Introduction (10 minutes)

• Welcome the participants
• Introduce the course (the general objective: the number of sessions, the expected outcome)
  General objective: Collect from the community traditional fairy tales, cooking recipes, poems, music, and cloths (pictures or drawings of traditional clothes)

Number of sessions: 7 workshops within 1 month, 2 workshops will be conducted per week with their consent

Expected outcome: Creating a better understanding of their culture and others’ culture; creating a shared platform for everyone to access different contents which will represent their tradition and culture, share a good practice of preserving their culture

• Introduce today session (objective and how long it will be)

Ice-breaking game (10 minutes)

• Ask the participants, who lives close to each other and pair them up depending on that
• Give all the pairs 5 minutes to get to know each other (name, their favorite color, favorite food, etc.)
• After 5 minutes, ask each pair to come forward. Ask them to introduce their partner by sharing the information s/he learned.
• Make sure when each pair is done presenting, others are clapping to encourage them

Main activity (60 minutes)

Part 1 – Introduce culture and its significance (15 minutes)

Culture: what is it, discussion and definition

• Introduce to the participants what is culture. For this, rather going straight to the definition, take an approach of disseminating your message through stories that they can relate. Start by telling this story

Amina is from Myanmar. She came to Bangladesh and noticed that people living in Bangladesh are speaking in a different language. Also, she observed the way Bangladeshis have dressed is very different from her country. She went to a restaurant to have her lunch but could not find any item that she usually eats.

 

• Now ask the participants, why Amina is finding things like language, food, clothes different from hers?

Tips: Do not pressurize them, if they are hesitant to say something. Encourage them to speak. On the other hand, if someone tries to share his/her answer, praise him/her so that others also get motivated to participate in the discussion)

 

• Explain to the participants: The reason why Amina found people from Bangladesh different is that they have a different culture than hers. Culture is a set of shared values, beliefs, traditions, behaviors that a group of people holds. A person grows up with certain cultures. S/he learns about the culture growing up. One’s culture is likely to be different from the others’ one.

 

Significance of culture

• A better understanding of the world:Our world is filled with diverse people and cultures. The more cultures our children are exposed to, the more accepting they are of people and cultures that are different from them.
• Valuing and respecting other cultures and our own: It’s not only important to be aware of other cultures, but also to value and respect them.
• Reducing stereotypes:The more we know about people and cultures, the less we’re likely to fall into grouping people based on stereotypes. A stereotype is a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea. Everyone is different and what’s true for one person may not be true for another.

Part 2 – Design a convenient strategy to implement the course (30 minutes)

• Explain: To achieve the objective of the course, we will have a series of workshops. Each workshop will cover different topics focusing on Rohingya culture and tradition. For example, one day we will cover the traditional recipes and on the other day, we will focus on traditional poems.
• Discuss together:
• Do you know some music, recipes or tales that represent Rohingya culture?

If yes, would you be willing to share your knowledge with all of us?

If no, who can we ask?

• How do we plan to collect? (Initiate the discussion by asking the question and throwing possibilities. Let the participants discuss and come to an agreement among themselves about collecting these contents)

Options can be:

• identify the person/s who has/have the knowledge and go to their place to collect it.
• ask them to come to the Ideas Box center during one workshop like a guest speaker and share his/her knowledge with all the participants.
• hear the stories from these identified people and share with others coming to the Ideas Box space.

• Introduce IT tools: We are going to use different IT tools to collect the content, such as the camera and the voice recorder.

Use the ‘How To Cards’ to demonstrate how to use these IT tools. Ask the participants to practice in front of you. If needed, divide the participants into two groups for efficient learning and practice.

• Explain that all the recording, videos and pictures that the participants will take during the workshop will later be uploaded on the Ideas Cube to create new resources for future participants.

Ask all participants if they agree to appear on videos/pictures or be recorded. Should any other person external to the group of participants should appear on video, picture or be recorded, make sure to ask for his/her consent as well.

Part 3 – Introducing fairy tales and connecting with culture (15 minutes)

• Explain that now we are going to learn more about fairy tales and how it is connected to culture
• Ask if they know what are fairy tales.

Encourage everyone to speak, if no one volunteers, you can explain by saying that fairy tales are a collection of imaginary short stories with fictional characters. Usually, these stories are passed from one generation to another. For example, grandmother telling it to mother/father when they were a child and then they pass it to their children to amuse them.

• How are fairy tales connected to culture?

Fairy tales can be a wonderful resource for illuminating the traditional values and lifestyles of a culture. Listeners can observe what is alike and what is different about folktales that belong to the same cultural tradition. Likewise, they may also learn the common and distinctive features in the folktales of different cultures.

• Play the audio “Tiger and boy” from the folder “Life in the Rohingya camp” using the Ideas Cube
• After playing the audio, mention to the participants, the audio was recorded by participants like them in Camp 21. This story mentions a boy and a tiger. This is a good example of a Rohingya fairy tale.
• Depending on the agreed method of collection, say: For the next workshop, ask your relatives/ neighbors/ the elderly of the community to tell you fairy tales and try to remember it well. If they agree, invite on of them to join during the next workshop.

Conclusion (10 minutes)

• Thank the participants for their involvement and concentration during the session.
• Summarize what was learnt during the session: We learnt what is culture and the significance of culture in our lives, we also learnt the basic use of camera and recorder which will help us to collect different content for our coming workshops. We were also introduced to the concept of fairy tales and their link to culture.
• Collect feedback from the participants. Ask questions like: Do you feel that you learnt something during the session? Do you think this new knowledge can be useful to you? Were you comfortable during the session?
• Give the date and location of the next session to the participants, make sure everybody will be available. If not, find a more convenient time and place so everybody can be here.