Narrative Project

Project Narrative

FROM THE MURAL ART TO DECORATED EGGS

Information About Our Site

Date of Project: Sunday 14.03.2004
Teachers and Classes: The students of the 10^th grade and the class teacher (SEHLANEC ANGELA)
How many students worked on this project: 5
Their ages were: 16 -17 years of age
School: “Eudoxiu Hurmuzachi” National College from Radauti , Romania
City: Radauti , Suceava , Romania
Postal Address: Calea Bucovinei, nr. 5
Tel: ++40/230/561522
Fax:
Project Contact Email: asehlanec@yahoo.co.uk
url : http://bucovina.741.com

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Project Overview

1. We entered our Web site in Doors to Diplomacy Category:
Arts and Culture

2. Description of our team:

Our team is composed of five pupils :Irina , Andreea , Elena , Roxana and Andrei , with ages between 16 and 17 years old .We are really proud that we are studying at one of the best high-schools in our country , “Eudoxiu Hurmuzachi “ National College , from Radauti. Last year it was ranked in the top 10 high-schools. We’ve joined together for doing this project , first of all because we have already knew that we can act like a real team. We have worked together also at other small projects at History, English, French and Maths too, but they were part of our school. We’ve enjoyed spending our free-time together, learning new, useful things one from the others. The tasks were shared by our Literature teacher, Ms. Sehlanec Angela, the one who informed us about “Doors to Diplomacy “.This way , each of us has chosen the field that he/she loved more. We all have looked up for information, images, new ideas for our site, trying to do a good job.

Even if we are not specialists in the field of art, because we are just children , we have emphasized here, first of all, the things fetching the authentic area of Romanian nation , things that are making the difference between people, that prove our cultural identity.

We are aware of the fact that there will be only a few to show interest in knowing the traditions and customs of a remote country , a country which they haven’t heard by now .Our opinion is that the time has come for us to show to the whole world all these values, totally unknown for a lot of people, as we've already said.

3. Summary of Our Project

For all of us , this project we’ve done together these days , firstly represents the methods we’ve learned about mural art , painted icons and decorated eggs , things that we have never heard about at school but couldn't study enough. At the same time , our research tasked our DIPLOMACY in those moments when we’ve found support from the others , in those moments that we’ve expected consideration , grasp and kindness , from certain persons and also when we have not received all of these. For that we can say our project represents , in the real meaning of the word , “A DOOR TO DIPLOMACY” and that is only because this site typifies a bridge among us and other individuals who offered us their help with great pleasure.

They are not too many those who have heard about this Square of Haven , unexplored, unfound by the rest of humanity – Bucovina, a wonderful region in the Northern part of our country – as a matter of fact, they are few those who know something about Romania ! That’s a well-founded reason which makes us take a resolution. We have to show the other nations our values! We’ll do this with our project , even if we’ll cover just a small part of what we could recount .We will limit just at the art of painting , even if Bucovina is also recognized through its traditional costumes, music and dance, customs which we don’t find at any other people, festivals of folklore, like “Arcanul” for instance, which takes place every year, in July , at Radauti (Suceava), that is our town.

Our project’s web pages also contain pictures of ancient monasteries in Bucovina, valuable icons with saints and decorated eggs, which have resisted so good in time, and which deserve to be seen.

4.Our Internet Access

Within the Romanian school system, public school access to the Internet is still in its infancy and limited to experimental projects. Using the Internet for educational purposes is not part of the national curriculum at this level, but soon this will change ..., the curricula for our next years will help.

Our class accesses the Internet as a group only sporadically even if we are a math-informatics class. Because we are at this level, we study the Turbo Pascal Program and this is not happening just at our school, it is something what’s happening at national level. In our school we have three laboratories of informatics, all of them equiped with professional computers and all of them connected to the Internet. If we want to navigate on the Internet at school, first of all, we have to give to the system engineer a very plausible reason and we have to do this after we finish our classes, when the laboratory is free.

5. Problems faced during our project

We all put our heart in this project and that’s because we wanted to do from our work of research something much more. We haven’t limited in trying to get everything from books , encyclopedias, or Internet. We have done little trips in zone, we talked with educated people from our local museum, we visited “The Gallery of Art“ from our town, Churches, Monasteries, we were concerned about what means painting in Bucovina (Moldova), from monks and nuns, which put their fait in us and they borrowed us valuable books which were useful then, at the realizing of our site. We can’t say we’ve welcomed difficult problems in realizing the project. There were just some little problems of organizatoric nature, that have determined us to cancel some actions. By the technical point of view, everything had happened all right, with the contribution of all members of our team. For example, there were days when we had to translate many pages from Romanian in to English language and we’ve helped each other, so the work became easier and more beautiful. The limited available time we had for doing this job could become a real problem for us, because we had heard about this contest two weeks before the time limit for entering the competition and if you want to do something real good, first of all, you have to draw up a very polished plan, of action which needs time and attention. With all of these, we hope we’ve reached, through our work, the standard expectations of all people, because we don’t want to disappoint anyone.

6. Our Project Sound Bite

Our project made us get better acquainted with our region’s traditional art, with mural painting, painted icons and decorated eggs. The past, which is present in the subject of our project, meets the future, present in the form of the project.

1.What information tools and technologies did you use to complete your Doors to Diplomacy project?

For realizing this project we have used our personal computer software, telephones, video players for watching brief documentaries, we’ve visited museums, monasteries, we’ve researched for information at libraries, in books, newspapers, and we’ve interviewed, people from our community. No tool used was donated by no one, just some books were borrowed from libraries or monasteries. For the time being, the idea of sponsorship to public schools has not been explored, most likely due to a lack of interest in part of the larger companies.

The most helpful for us it was the computer ...the Internet. We’ve used the software programs Microsoft Front page to produce the Web pages and the Web navigation program Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01. Some pictures were scanned with school’s flatbed scanner, and some pictures were taken from other sites from the ...Internet.

We all made use of encyclopedias from our private libraries, magazines, leaflets. For this project we’ve opened with nostalgia our old boxes with souvenirs and we’ve brought out to light nice and wonderful objects bought on our previous trips for using them also like source material.

2.In what ways did you act as “ambassadors “ and spokespersons for your project both on-line and in person?

Firstly, we had informed our friends and our classmates about the project we had started two weeks ago and about “DOORS TO DIPLOMACY”, then the teachers, the leadership of our high-school, and other schools too. A lot of people from our community heard about us from our local newspapers, from radio or local television, which did some publicity for our site, and they were delighted of our good job. Some of them, so attached by Romanian folklore, thanked us for what we are doing. We were content and proud of us!

3.What has been the impact of your project on your community?

We think our project that it is favorable for presenting these values to other nations and to our community too. We say this because we have interviewed some people and we observed that, even if they are living here, so close to history, so close to art, not all of them know to appreciate all of these.

Through our site we succeeded in making the people of our local community to be more interested in keeping intact the tradition and in keeping close to the taste for beauty, which has been transmitted from a generation to other.

Two days ago we went, accompanied by our principal teacher and our classmates to an orphanage for helping the kids which are living there with clothes, toys, sweets and most of all with a smile .Also, we thought to learn them about our culture, about religion, traditions, customs and things that are written on our site. We were happy to see that they were learning so quickly and with so much joy. Our presence and the new things they have learned helped them to escape from their daily monotony. We’ve promised we’ll come back soon!

4. How did your project involve other members of your community as helpers and volunteers?

Yes, it’s true, most teams need lots of advice and help to complete their entry, but we’ve done almost all alone, with a little help from our Literature, Informatics and English teacher. This doesn’t mean we’ve not involved other members of our community in our work.

For example, our town’s mayor, Mrs. Mihai Frunza, offered us a little interview when we’ve visited the mayors office, interview what could be seen on our site’s first page. Like we said, a lot of information came from the monks and the nuns from the monasteries, who have borrowed us books and who let us to make photos of very old icons for the project.

Our classmates were very enthusiastic in participating at our site, helping us with interviewing their parents, their grandparents and other elderly members of our local community, researching the local libraries for material.

Thanks to the leadership of the museum, people can admire on our site beautiful images with decorated eggs and with instruments which are used for painting them.

We have to say “Thank you “ to those who work at the local television and radio and to those which work at “Obiectiv”, the newspaper that has helped us with the promotion of our site.

We appreciate the work of our mate, Dan Mutescu, and we thank him for all his help. Without him we wouldn't have done this project in time.

5. Discoveries, Lessons and Surprises

We were pleasantly surprised to see that a lot of people from our local community became more interested in our values. They started to ask themselves if their life won’t be without gaiety, if our customs and traditions will disappear with this wind that spreads all, and that goes nowhere. They found a way to stop all of these. They found a way to interfere against the oblivion and we will help them afterwards .