AIW and 20 students of Liceo Muratori San Carlo: social innovation starts with young people
21 February 2021- The Association for the Integration of Women (AIW) is excited to announce “Welcome to Modena” a new platform aimed at empowering Modena’s migrant community through technology developed in partnership by twenty 16-17 year old language students at Liceo Muratori San Carlo. When professors approached the AIW with the goal of designing a PCTO experience for their students, the organization took the opportunity to its community, asking the young migrant women that AIW works with “When you first arrived in Modena, what was the most challenging for you?” All participants spoke to the initial difficulty of knowing physically where to go for services, and how to get there. The AIW together with Liceo Linguistico Muratori San Carlo thus created a mapping project aimed at empowering Modena’s newcomers.
Twenty students with different backgrounds and experience were paired into groups and tasked with researching services, collecting missing information (such as contact info and languages spoken), and mapping them into a user-friendly tool. The students reported not only learning more about the services that Modenese society has to offer, but also gaining an increased awareness about what is needed in order to make our systems more inclusive to new arrivals.
“I think it has given me the opportunity to reflect more about the importance of the associations that help immigrants and how a group of people can create something so important in the future I would like to participate on a project like this, because I think I still have to learn a lot”
For the teachers the experience has been totally new and very positive.:
“Caroline has transmitted enthusiasm and drive to everyone, teachers and students, who have started the unusual project of diving into the reality of public offices and private businesses and look at their own city through the eyes of newly-arrived migrant women. The students of Liceo Linguistico Muratori San Carlo love foreign languages and think their studies will take them far, this time, doing this work experience called PCTO entirely in English, they have discovered they already live in a cosmopolitan context , they just need to look at their own Modena with new eyes”
As the AIW works to take this map forward and make it accessible to Modena’s community, students from Muratori San Carlo will play an essential role: “I think that if we wanted to take this forward we would have to start again by taking an "off-line" approach and understand how we could efficiently help migrants women with their location spotting with a more hands-on/concrete approach through the data we gathered.” (student)
