Graduados en Acción

Center CONVIVEN focuses on promoting and strengthening the development of the social community network integral to children, adolescents, young people and families in the neighborhoods of Villa Lugano and Mataderos by creating recreational space; providing job training, educational, cultural and community activities. In March of last year works that were created through their “FishEye” photography program were exhibited at ProyectArte’s Prima Gallery. This collaboration was the genesis of a strong relationship between the two organizations, and prompted CONVIVEN to propose that ProyectArte organize art workshops at CONVIVEN’s headquarters. Seeing it as an opportunity for our recent graduates to develop their organizational and teaching skills, ProyectArte offered Lucreica Raimondi and Lucila Sanchez Peña, 2009 graduates of ProyectArte, the opportunity to facilitate and teach the CONVIVEN workshops. Commenting on her experiences as a teacher, Lucila said, “Even though my focus is painting, I was given a drawing class to teach, and that was even more motivating, probably because it was an area where I could also learn. I was nervous about giving the class, and worried that I wouldn´t like the place but all of those doubts, from the first day that I taught with those kids, dissolved. It´s wonderful to see how someone gets excited about something that you´re presenting. The important thing is to be stimulating and convey that feeling. To teach in that space of reciprocal illumination, – I feel very satisfied every time I leave CONVIVEN.” Lucrecia added, “Working with adolescents from very poor neighborhoods is not easy because of the experiences that they live every day, but it´s not because of that that kids stop having the desire to do stuff. The key is to motivate them to do things that they like to do, in this case we gave a class on painting, which is what they decided on through a scholarship offered by the Minister of Social Development. The experience is co-motivating because I am face to face with a social reality that is totally different: the majority of my adolescent students have children, few of them go to school and they suffer from discrimination. By all means, I enjoy working with them and we found a way to create a work environment that is very warm, where the kids connect with the art and with me. For me, it is really important to work from the point of view of being granted a scholarship, and the need to be responsible and to commit yourself, and I tried to express this to them by sharing my experiences at ProyectArte. The classes are an experience that is renewed each Thursday in the classroom because it goes beyond my lesson plans, and is directly dependent on what the students already know, through their motivation and what they bring to the class , or through the affinity that they have with the material presented to them.”