EAC » Extra-Academic Programs

Yoga at Haugland – Jan 2012

Community Service - Haugland Rehabiliteringssenter Comments Off

Feb 132012

Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured. ~B.K.S. Iyengar

The Yoga and Relaxation EAC takes place every Wednesday from 6-7 p.m. at Haugland. Five first years and six second years come together to create an accessible and simple Yoga and Relaxation activity for the Haugland patients.

The people that attend have a variety of different injuries and problems and part of the challenge of the EAC is to ensure that all the patients feel that they are taken care of and that they do not perform a pose that they do not feel comfortable doing. Also the variation in the seriousness of the patients issues is a big challenge for us, as some can barely walk while others are able to do all the poses.

This is part of what makes this EAC so meaningful, the ability to feel that we can provide an activity that fits everybody and that you do not need any prerequisite knowledge or skills before attending.

Hearing from patients that the Yoga and Relaxation has helped them a small step in their physical improvement is a very valuable experience, feeling that you can actually make a difference.

Just before the winter break the first years started doing entire sessions independently and they are now approaching the point where they soon will be able to let go of the second years.

EAC Creative Craft Winter Session – Jan 2012

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Feb 082012

A very enthusiastic and happy group has had the pleasure and satisfaction of trying out the basics of several crafts.

Through some most enjoyable and relaxed but busy hands on learning sessions, we acquired some of basic skills.

These included :

paper making
card making
wool felting
needle felting
winter wonderland creations
cane basket work and……
tie-dye sessions.

I hope some of us will be able to use and build on these beginnings sometime later in life.

Taekwondo EAC

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Jan 262012

Taekwondo is a modern martial art, characterized by its fast, high and spinning kicks. There are multiple interpretations of the name taekwondo. Taekwondo is often translated as ‘the way of hand and foot’.

My definition of the name Taekwondo is:

Tae=’to strike or block with the foot’ or ‘to kick’, it also means ‘jump’
K’won=’Fist’, ‘to strike or block with hand’
Do=’The way of’ or ‘art’.

Put this together and Taekwondo means: “The art of Kicking and Punching” or “The art of unarmed combat”. The sport of the popular modern martial arts. Has been founded in Korea and is one.

This activity is a very good sport for students to be more active and energetic. They learn fast reactions through games learn to respect others and learn to know their abilities and disabilities.

Different tipes of stretching makes student be more flex able. Also we have a competition between participants of activity. Students wear full body protection, only kicks and punches to the body are allowed, no kicks to the head.

The goals of this activity are:

to develop an appreciation for Taekwondo as a sport and as an art
to achieve physical fitness through positive participation
to improve mental discipline and emotional equanimity
to learn self-defense skills
to develop a sense of responsibility for one self and others.

-Summer

Youth Leadership Day – Dec 2011

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Jan 252012

Youth Leadership Course Development EAC is a group whose focus is to develop a leadership training day at the college for the students. We start the year with discussions about all types of leaders and what it means to be a leader. This can be a very difficult but interesting part of this EAC because we all have very different definitions of leaders and different role models. As we share our opinions, we change aspects of other opinions around us, challenging others to really consider what leadership is.

After this stage, the EAC moves into the planning of the Youth Leadership day. This year (Dec 6-7) we had students attend one workshop in order to not overload them with information and to really focus their attention. Some of the workshops included youth entrepreneurship and public speaking. After Youth Leadership day the group did some critiquing and planning for next year. The first years in the group have decided to take responsibility for the planning of the EAC, as it most pertains to them. The last phase of this EAC is some general leadership training and sharing. We realize we have an immense amount of knowledge in our group that when we share with members eventually trickles down into the RCN family.

-Scott

Structure of the Youth Leadership Day

Workshop name	Hosted by	Summary
Teamwork I	Katherine (Katu) & Mais	Included teamwork with main focus on two aspects: one in which there is more than one leader involved and the other where there is one leader. In both, through activities, participants learnt how to work together and about their strengths and weaknesses when working in groups.
Teamwork II	Louise & Ieva	Teamwork is essential! Individuals are becoming less and less autonomous as theworld demands greater interdependence. The team development process is essential to the success of every team.Workshop objectives: Define a team Have interdependet tasks Have a commitment to work together Share the responsibility of reults Manage relationship across boundaries Activities for developing your leadership and team working skills
What is Leadership? How to be a Leader.	Samuel & Rodi	Included: defining the term leadership and the ways it can be interpreted including tips on how to become a leader.
Image of a Movement	Ida & Scott	Participants learnt about successful movements, identified effective techniques, and found how to get people up off the couch and active in a movement with focus on inspiring others and crafting the image of movement and use this knowledge to their advantage.
Fundraising and Speech Writing	Peshwas & Tamim	Participants learnt effective methods of attracting financiers to different projects and commitments. The workshop not went over essential considerations and strategies that are useful and credible, but also focused on where funding is needed and where projects can go around without funding. In essence, this workshop was good for those planning to start organizations, host events, organize conferences etc., or simply committed to a life in the bureaucratic sphere. Furthermore, participants also learnt the important steps in writing speeches. All participants drafted one speech during the workshop to practice persuasive speech.
Meeting Management	Henrik & Christine	Aim of the workshop: To learn how to manage meetings effectively How to get the most out of a meeting as a participant How to make your voice heard How to communicate effectively within a meeting Included: Holding presentations on problems about meeting management and present different possible solutions to those problems. Plenty of interactive activities to demonstrate the techniques learned.
Public Speaking and Communication	Basem & Mirza	Included: How to address public, speech giving and get the attention of huge amount of people and overcoming fear.Improving skills of being a great orator who is able to keep effect on audience and convince them in what he says. In addition to that, being able to be a good listener as well as a good speaker, organizing ideas and using them.
Youth Political Leadership and Social Entrepreneurship	Amine & Madeley	The main aims of this workshop was to give to the participants the bases : “How can they give solution or answers ,as youth political leaders ,to the different political problems that many countries have around the world”, where the participants analysed the weaknesses and strengths from their governments of the selected countries. One of the principal characteristics that a leader must have is to be a social entrepreneur,therefore throught this workshop the ideas about how a young leader can increase the resources and development of their areas was promoted.
Leading Youth Activism and Social Movement	Kanchan & Mariana	Participants went through a “Vision>Plan>Promote>Do>Review” approach of British Council’s Global change-maker tool kit. Each participant came up with individual or group projects on pressing issues by the end of the session.Included: Activism speed dating: Sharing your activism with the other participants Working on Issue Groups Plenary session: How to come up with a project? Reporting and presenting projects Mastering the “Elevator Pitch” What next? … And: Over to you! What lies ahead for the participants? SPECIAL FEATURE: Introduction and Applying to Global Youth Summit 2012 (London); personal experience in GYS 2011 by Kanchan.

Amnesty International – Oct 2011

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Jan 092012

Amnesty International – Corporate Social Responsibility – Action fall 2011

In November 2011 we have been campaigning in Flekke, Dale, Førde and Bergen for the Corporate Social Responsibility, collecting 449 signatures under the petition to the Norwegian government.

How a company conducts their business can have big consequences for people and the environment.

Companies therefore have a responsibility which not only concerns their profit, but to also comply with existing laws and rules in the countries where they operate. For a company to maintain their social responsibility the company needs to integrate social, environmental and human rights considerations in their business strategies.

Companies have immense power and this power is binding. Amnesty demands that Norwegian companies do not violate human rights directly or indirectly, when operating domestically and abroad.

RAFTO 2011

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Dec 022011

On November 4^th some members of Rafto EAC attended RAFTO Symposium 2011 program under the supervision of EAC supervisor Erik at Radisson Blu Hotel Norge, Bergen.

Seminar started at 9am with the welcome speech from Therese Jebsen, Excutive director of the Rafto foundation. In the first session Guest speakers presented their speech. There were three guest speakers. Graeme Reid, Program Director, spoke on the rights of LGBT people in an African context. Annika Rodriguez, International advisor spoke about the Norwegian Organization for LGBT and Monica Mbari spoke on State Sanctioned Violence. The 2011 Rafto prize Laurate Frank Mughisa and his company Pepe Onziema represented Sexual Minorties Uganda, SMUG is a coalition of LGBTI human rights Organizations working to promote the human rights of LGBTI people, or sexual minorities.

Second Session started at 12:00 with the opening remarks from Halvor Saeter, Director Section for Human Rights and Democracy.Then Panel 1 started. ‘Panel 1: the past and the present of Human rights’ was chaired by Tom Porteous, Deputy program director. Five panelists representing five different countries spoke about the human right issues in their respective countries. All five of them were former Rafto awarded people. They were: Malahat Nasibova ( Azerbizan),Shirin Ebadi(Iran)Peter Molnar(Hungary) Souhayr Belhassen (Tunisia) and Mohammed Daddach (Western Sahara).

After a 20 minutes break we headed for Panel 2. ‘Panel 2: Future Human Rights Challenges’ was chaired by Simon Panek, Executive Director, People in Need Foundation. Like in first panel there were five panelists from five different countries. Panel 2 started with Frank Mughisa. Don Raul Vera Lopez (Mexico) Rediya Kadeer (Xinjiang,China), Bulambo Lembelembe (Congo) and Vo Van Ai ,Vietnam were the five panelists representing their respective countries and human rights violation issues in their countries. These five Rafto Laureates spoke very strongly with passion and experiences from their work, what they have been doing and what they want to do.

After the 20 minutes break audiences were given chance to ask questions. Because of limited time there wasn’t any big discussion going around the hall as there was supposed to be.

The seminar ended with closing remarks by Tom Porteous, Simon Panek, Kevin Bales and Antoine Bernard.

All in all seminars was very effective and informative. It really motivated us and made us think about the human rights issue not only from the place of our origin but enabled us to have an open perspective on different issues from different places of the world.

We enjoyed it!

Beekeeping EAC

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Nov 242011

The Beekeeping EAC started as an activity last year, with the college’s acquisition of two hives from a local beekeeper. This summer our hives multiplied, and we are now at four.

In October we extracted around 55 kilos of honey from them, and part of our project is to bottle, label and locally sell this product — and others such as beeswax candles, honey lipbalm and soap.

We are learning beekeeping and all these additional crafts hands-on, by doing all the practical tasks required by this type of farming throughtout the year, but also by studying the theory in the classroom.

Our aims are many-fold.

First and foremost we want to get to know as much as possible about this ancient, ecologically respectful and gentlest form of animal husbandry.

We think beekeeping is a skill we can all take with us wherever we go after UWC: beehives thrive everywhere, even in cities!

As for here, we have learned our bees will yearly have a larger and larger impact in the pollination of the plant species present in the area, resulting in trees and bushes yielding progressively more flowers and fruit.

We want to multiply our hives some more and eventually contribute to some of the school charities with our proceeds.

Currently we are also in the process of turning our honey into an organic product, by changing the winter feed of our bees.

Hurrah for beekeeping!

World Today Oct 2011 Report

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Nov 042011

This World Today EAC term has been one of the most popular, and exciting ones in recent memory. Speakers have been brought in from some interesting backgrounds such as a member of the Israeli Army, A former student working in the field of HIV and AIDS and a representative from the international campaign to ban cluster munitions. The EAC group has been busy organizing every World Today in some capacity from the opening one regarding the famine in the Horn of Africa to the passionate presentation and discussion about the Kurdish region of the middle east during PBL week.

One of the more noteworthy sessions was the aforementioned speaker from the cluster munitions campaign. A Canadian woman named Kimberly Brown spoke to a nearly full audience about the current world situation in regards to landmines and the equally, if not more dangerous cluster bombs. Right now there are 37 countries that are still directly affected by cluster bomb use and there are 86 countries that remain with stockpiled cluster munitions. All this despite the fact that 111 countries have joined an international convention, which Kimberly worked to create, that banned the use or possession of these brutal weapons. Even more countries have joined the 157 nation strong treaty to ban landmines, which has been around a little longer and is a very proud success of the movement that Kimberly is so passionate about.

The World Today EAC has been striving to make informative and passionate speakers and discussion forums available for students this term and we hope to continue the excitement that appears on campus at dinner every Friday as students prepare for another intriguing week in the World Today lineup.

Gender Week – Mar 2011

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Apr 242011

Once more, GAS has used most of this second academic term to organize Gender Week, which happened from March 8th to March 13th, including International Women’s Day. The object of this event is to create in our school community the possibility to the discuss the social, cultural and political issues surrounding gender, so as to raise awareness about them.

Apart from movies and documentaries related to the topic of Gender, this year we had with us Janice Abu Hani, a guest speaker from UK/Israel who talked about the role of women and her own experiences in the Bedouin community in Israel. We also organized a workshop and cafe about Gender and Color, which was quite well attended.

All in all, another good term for GAS.

Amnesty Workshop – Feb 2011

Amnesty International Group No Responses »

Feb 172011

On the 11th of Feb 2011, with Guest speaker Tanja Clifford ( Head of Amnesty International Norway West) speaking to the enthusiastic students of RCNUWC, the World Today evening turned out to be really special!

Below is the link to the Amnesty – Norway website about Amnesty Workshop which was conducted from 11th Feb to 12th Feb 2011.

http://www.amnesty.no/om-amnesty/amnestys-regioner/region-vest/lokale-nyheter/plenty-activism-and-guts-red-cross-united-no

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