Last November 20th our spanish partner, Arrabal-AID, finished the second edition of the Photography Course in Málaga (Spain).
The course was structured in two stages of 32 hours each one: a first “in-person” stage that took place from October 26th to November 9th, and a second distance learning stage; from November 10th to November 19th.
The face-to-face training was restricted to 15 students in order to ensure all the safety measures for COVID-19 prevention. A total of 45 participants enrolled in the course: 15 pupils for the on-site stage, and 30 users for the e-learning in the Moodle platform.
As usual, these groups of participants, as all the people who showed interest in the course, were a reflection of the range of people covered by Arrabal-AID. But also of the greatwork that our spanish partner does, striving towards the involvement of people from different social circumstances.
This is also a mirror of the society we live in where it is more and more necessary to have a proper knowledge of digital competences. Most of the students that attend the course are people who struggle with new technologies (including ‘digital natives’). They barely know how to use it, so they cannot work with it confidently and they complain that they cannot manage themselves when ‘something unexpected occurs’ or that they do not know how to use ‘some software’ beyond its basic tools.
As before, the face-to-face stage combined in-class lectures with outdoor practices. We redesigned the course schedule to take the most the sunlight during the outdoor practises. Due to the intensive qualities of this stage, the course kept the structure of 50% lectures and 50% practice, but now we organized some sessions to be entirely outdoors.
The photography assignments for this second edition were fully focused on elements of cultural interest of Málaga, looking forward to the ‘Open Photo Contest’ which is under development and will be launched in the near future.
So we established paths of cultural heritage attending to two main factors: the time we had to complete the path, and that these elements were not placed in narrow alleys. So we designed the path looking for heritage that were placed in wide-open spaces. Some of them had to be interesting locations to phograph during the daylight; and others during the night.
Students were able to know about many other locations of cultural interest through the official website of Cultural Heritage in Málaga: http://cultura.malaga.eu/es/patrimonio/ , where they can design their own paths. The main subjects of our path were the Roman Theatre, the Alcazaba, the Incarnation Cathedral, the Episcopal Palace, the Museum of Málaga and The Lighthouse among others.
The e-learning stage provided access to 30 students more to the Moodle platform where they could find all the documentation about the course, as well as different assignments to prove the learned competences. At the same time, our mentor worked to provide suplementary information such as references and examples from photography or recommended books.
During the distance students had the opportunity to participate in a virtual meeting with our mentor. This was one of the ways to offer a closer mentoring. Students participated actively, exposing individualized issues that were realated to common ones. Seeing photographies of each one of our students provided them the abilities to provided constructive commentaries about others work.
The participative attitude of our students amazed us. They were plenty of questions and so filled with the desire to learn more and more about photography and digital devices. Also they were very respectful with all the COVID prevention measures.
Each one of the participants who completed the course in any of both stages have received a certificate of course completion, providing and accreditation of the successful conclusion of the CICERO program.
