Placement and internship case studies

I decided to undertake the PREP opportunity, because I was very keen to contribute to my community, especially for an issue - such as bullying, that is so representative of today's society. Knowing that Kosovo is a multi-ethnic country, and knowing the prevalence of bullying behaviour towards minorities and from them, I decided to tackle this issue while benefiting from the PREP fund. Another reason was that I believed PREP would be a good opportunity for me to develop my professional capacities, and become a well-rounded researcher. I believed that this opportunity would positively affect my future career opportunities, especially in Kosovo.

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As this was the school that had the largest number of multi-ethnic students.

I have created a summer school for 30 children of different ethnicities in a primary school in Peja, Kosovo. The aim of the project was to deal with bullying, stereotypes that ethnic minorities usually face on daily basis. I thought that the best way to do so, is through communication. Language is a powerful weapon that can be used to foster positive behaviour and minimize negative behaviour. Through language, there is understanding, and through understating there is peace.In the project, I used activities that aimed at making students communicate to one another, learn words and experiences of others so that bullying behaviour is minimized, especially in schools. Children played team building activities, and they had partners of different minorities. Another activity was to find shared words from both of the languages. Through these activities they understood that they share much more similarities than differences from one another. Lastly, an open event to public was organized where I gave a talk on the positive effect of bilingualism and how to use bilingualism as a means to anti-bullying behaviour. Since I was the coordinator of this project, and this was entirely my project all the responsibilities- starting from the development phase such as developing activities, making arrangements with the school and parents of the children, up to conducting the activities, were mine.

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My piece of advice to students is to use the opportunities that are given to us by our University and other institutions, as they offer a great help into shaping us personally and professionally.