January 12th 2002 Today's session was a brainstorming exercise in selecting subject matter for our final film. Despite the absence of a few people, we decided to press on and discussed numerous issues and ideas from the group. Many of the ideas had a common theme, with experiences at school being the most predominant. Seven topics were short-listed by the group for further research and information gathering. The topics are as follows: Children in North Belfast Schools: One of the children's mothers teaches in North Belfast and had talked about girls who bragged openly in class about throwing petrol bombs, and the misconceptions the pupils had about the situation and the Catholic community. We thought that interviews from pupils in this situation who had no or very little contact outside their own traditions and culture could be very interesting. We could probably get access to pupils from the school and could try to organise similar interviews from Catholic pupils in the area. Bringing the pupils together to a party or social event where they interact with each other and members of the different cultural backgrounds in our group would be one way of avoiding too many 'talking heads'. The theme wouldn't be approached in a very serious or judgmental way, but strive to highlight misconceptions about cultures they don't usually mix with. Cross Community Projects/ Corrymeela: Samuel has visited Corrymeela in the past and described how the 'two tribes' didn't know how to deal with him. The Sharma girl's parents have been involved in community and cross community work. We decided to try to collect stories from Corrymeela or other cross community projects, which we thought, might be quite comical, or could go some way to explain the tribe or gang mentality in young people. Multi Cultural Education in Schools: This idea came out of a discussion on bullying. The Sharma girls experienced difficulties at school in the past and after their family got involved in talks about Hindu beliefs and other cultural traditions such as dance in the school, the bullying stopped. The school now includes more multi-cultural activities on a regular basis. Learning Difficulties in Education: The group had lots of stories related to this subject, from behavioural problems, medical problems and dyslexia. The concerns of the group were mainly that some children were disadvantaged at school and teachers hadn't the time to provide the extra help sometimes required which occasionally led to the disadvantaged being excluded in some way. There were strong feelings about what was 'fair' and what wasn't and that not every child's rights to education and equality was being protected. They felt that sacrificing the special needs of a smaller group for the greater good was unfair. The group agreed to think about the structure of this subject as a film and consider ways to get around the possible difficulties in getting permission to film situations like this in schools and get willing participants who have experienced such problems. Contd. On next page