Youth in the 21st Century; Debating and Producing Media Training in Armenia
From January 26 to February 7, 2012, Open Society Foundations (OSF) in partnership with International Debate Education Association (IDEA) organized series of journalism, debating and digital story telling training-workshops in Aghveran. I was one of the 38 youth participants of the workshops.
Our international and local trainers, Vanitha Nadaraj, Artur Papyan, and Suren Deheryan gave us the opportunity to get basic knowledge on journalism, to write media memoirs, learn ethical and legal issues, interviewing, blogging, to differ feature stories from opinion-based articles and finally write our own final feature stories.
Intensive training and workshops on how to be debate influenced on trainees a lot. Even during breaks participants discussed the motions of the debates, asked for claims, evidence, reasoning and POI (point of information). Our debate trainers Alexander Cavell, Anna Merkurieva, Sergei Naumoff, Anahit Galikyan and Lucineh Arakelyan introduced us the basics of argumentation theory, gave some background information, introduced 3v3 format and speaker roles, prepared us for public speaking, note-taking, and parliamentary debates.
Youth in the 21st Century; Debating and Producing Media aimed also to teach the participants skills of digital story telling. Trainers Mite Kuzevski and Goran Igic tried to share their knowledge and experience on how to use photos, videos, audios and text to produce a digital story and at the same time not to make it redundant.
Smart young activists took much advantage and knowledge from these workshops. Besides the classes we had home assignments and worked with teams to accomplish them. Strangers broke the ice and became friends, perhaps in some cases, lifetime friends. We had movie screening and watched “The Great Debaters”. Guest speakers visited Arthur’s Resort in Aghveran and delivered interesting speeches.
The project succeeded as smart young activists are quite inspired and encouraged to get involved in media producing and participating in debates. In the end teams consisting of 4-5 participants prepared final feature and digital stories on a certain problem that youth face in Armenia. Disabled people, female child abortion, social and financial problems, involvement in politics were in our target.
It is worth to mention, this was for the first time OSF and IDEA organized such workshop and they decided the first venue to be Armenia. Hopefully they are satisfied with the results and our contribution and the workshops will have continuation in other countries too.
Nvard Sununu, FD blogger from Armenia
