The university’s Cottonera Resource Centre at Vittoriosa held a community education project focusing on Holy Week, a theme that served as the springboard for venturing into different areas of enquiry and knowledge.
I would like to think that the setting up of this university outreach centre represents another attempt at making our university visible and present in different districts throughout the Maltese islands.
As a board member of this centre, I bear this question in mind: on whose terms is the engagement taking place? This explains the need to draw on motivating factors such as events and issues that capture the communities’ (and I stress the plural) imagination.
Hopefully, other centres and outreach ‘community engagement’ programmes will continue to be carried out by the university, also availing itself of some excellent community premises in various localities, including local council premises. I would recommend a two-way engagement, regarding project choice and pedagogical approach adopted.
A central question for this project is: how does one build educationally on what really gets the communities, in the region, going? What is the ‘occasional motive’, to echo Italian critical educator Lorenzo Milani, and how do we move beyond this to explore a broad range of knowledges (plural intended)?
There is much grist for the mill for an education that extends beyond the spiritual
Political education, with a strong historical foundation, featured prominently in the Holy Week project. My session, for instance, focused on imperialism at the time (the specific historical context in Jesus Christ’s time) and later periods.
We ventured into a discussion on colonialism and neo-colonialism in later and present times, including the current intensification of globalisation, with its colonising foundation and the plight of immigrants perceived as victims of a colonial legacy.
Themes concerning different forms of colonialism, such as, for example, ‘settler colonialism’ or a country’s ‘internal colonialism’, were broached.
In my view, the project offered potential for drawing out and discussing relations between different art genres – popular and those conventionally and perhaps problematically presented as being more ‘highbrow’. One session, on the artistic aspect of Holy Week, led by Fine Arts Museum curator Sandro Debono, generated discussions of this nature.
The session by Marco Galea on theatre, and the ones that followed by Mgr Alfred Vella on spirituality, Anna Spiteri on environmental issues, Anthony Bonanno on Roman imperialism, Nathalie Grima on women/gender, Eric Montfort and Albert Bell on music (solemn music, marches and rock) and Michael Grech on film (juxtaposing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Vangelo Secondo Matteo against Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ) – all in the context of the Holy Week theme – likewise generated much discussion. The intention was for both session leader and participants to move ‘from the known to the unknown’, to adopt a well-known pedagogical maxim.
This is a learning experience for all involved in the spirit of informed dialogue.
The range of topics demonstrates the potential that lies in developing projects around events capturing the popular imagination. I would like to think that this approach falls within the best critical traditions of community education. Alas, time constraints (timing is very important when drawing on things that capture the popular communal imagination) limited the number of themes that could be broached.
Communal celebrations or commemorations such as Holy Week, with its plethora of different forms of artistic expression and craftwork, as well as culinary delights, constitute what Antonio Gramsci calls manifestations of the ‘popular creative spirit’.
What strikes me as most relevant is the potential to turn this form of communal expression and manifestation of the ‘popular creative spirit’ into an educational event about matters concerning people’s lives. Spirituality is the obvious aspect underlined time and time again with regard to Holy Week, in churches, the media etc. This was certainly accorded its due importance in the project. I would say that it was a recurring theme throughout the project.
The opening session by historian Joseph Grima combined historical and spiritual aspects admirably. It set the context by providing a rigorous overview of the historical developments of outward Holy Week events on the island, at the same time provoking participants to engage in a dialogue drawing on their own perceptions, some based on evidence and others based on hearsay. The latter were corroborated or rebutted through documented historical evidence.
There is, however, much grist for the mill for an education that extends beyond the spiritual. This project was conceived in such a way that it should appeal to believers of different denominations and non-believers alike.
It so happens that the first project chosen had a religious ring to it. Another theme chosen in future may not have any religious dimension at all. It might, for all I know, centre round the popular Regatta (which offers possibilities for tackling knowledge of a technical nature).
Choice of the follow-up project depends on discussions with the participants and, hopefully, several other members of the surrounding communities.