Toolbox

The toolbox playfully promotes a more comprehensive understanding of migration among adolescents and young adults. Interactive games and exercises on the everyday topics of food, places and music facilitate access to the topics of migration, mobility and transculturality as well as exclusion and inclusion.

The toolbox is intended to make it possible to experience that

• identities of persons, objects and places cannot be clearly delimited, but are always interconnected, today and in the past.
• migration, movement, migration, exchange and social diversity are a historical constant and thus “normal”.
• in the prevailing contemporary discussions, a strongly truncated understanding of “migration” is communicated.
• in social diversity, migration and mobility lies the potential for creating something new and new connections.
• mobility depends on multiple, sometimes invisible borders that affect people in very different ways.
• one’s own perspective is only one of many others and it can be broadened.

It is our concern to contribute with this offer to a diverse society that is worth living for all. The toolbox was developed in cooperation with the projects “Multaka: Meeting Point Museum” and “Common Past – Common Future II“.

In our work with the Toolbox, we pursue a low-threshold approach. The free offer can be booked by youth clubs as well as by schools (from the 7th grade). It should also be emphasized that

• our toolbox concept follows the approach of a flexible choice of topics. The participants can choose from several topics according to the situation and are not restricted to one topic. If necessary, key topics can be jointly coordinated and defined in advance.
• the Multaka Guides react flexibly to the interests of the young people, promote exchange and encourage them to present their own points of view in the group.
• the Multaka Guides, with their expertise as mediators, bring new perspectives and experiences into the class/youth clubs and also offer identification possibilities for young people who are considered to have a migration background.
• the Multaka Guides work according to the dialogical principle. The focus is on a binding approach and communicative interaction. This is the ideal prerequisite for entering into a prejudice-conscious exchange with young people and young adults.

We developed the toolbox in a participatory manner from 2020 to 2022: Youth and young adults were also involved in all project phases, contributing their ideas to the development and testing the box in practice. Adolescents and young adults from various Berlin youth clubs helped to develop the topics and formats in the first project phase. In the second project phase, members of the youth committee of the National Museums in Berlin, Achtet Alis MB, worked with the project team to develop the individual exercises and games.

Social pedagogues from independent youth work also advised the project team during the conception phase. Before the toolbox was finalized, it was tested with focus groups of young people in several Berlin youth leisure facilities. The pilot tests were accompanied by a professional evaluation.

Initiated by the Museum of Islamic Art in 2015, the project is a cooperation between the Museum of Islamic Art, The Ancient Near East Museum, Bode Museum and the German Historical Museum.

As part of the project people with migration and/or refugee experience from Syria and Iraq, and the later on (in 2021) from Afghanistan and Iran, were trained as museum guides so they could lead interactive museum tours for other diaspora members in their native language.

Multaka – Arabic for “meeting point” – bridges different historical periods as well as old and new places, by creating a dialogue through guided encounters between exhibits and a diverse audience. Through the acknowledgment of one’s own cultural heritage, knowledge, and language, as well as reclaiming agency by the Arabic and Persian-speaking Guides, the project aims to diversify the narratives in the cultural sphere and to enable confident and constructive connection with cultural institutions.

The toolbox covers the topics of migration, mobility and transculturality as well as exclusion and inclusion via three low-threshold thematic approaches: food, places, and music. Through the everyday themes of food, places, and music, larger questions are raised, for example:

How long have peppers lived in Germany? Who brought pasta to Italy? How do half-timbered houses migrate to the USA? What does a park bench have to do with exclusion? Are borders always visible? And who can cross them?

Participants discover migration and global migration movements, exclusion and inclusion from new perspectives.

If required, you can choose a focus for the implementation when booking, for example, if you are discussing a suitable topic in class.

Selectable focus areas for the toolbox sessions are:

• Migration movements (from food, architecture, music).
• Borders
• Hostile Design
• discussion of personal biographies and how to deal with categories such as “refugee”, “migrant worker”, “expat”, “person with migrant background”, etc.
• Critical examination of images of the Orient and Oriental clichés

What? Interactive games and exercises about food, music and places

For whom? Teenagers and young adults (from 12 years / 7th grade)

Where? In youth clubs and schools in Berlin

How? On-site implementation by our Multaka guides

When? Flexible dates on request, duration 90 min. each

Free of charge – appointment requests and registration at: info@multaka.de