Our Schoolaboratory summer school program and seven years of persevering joint attempts to change the everyday life experience of marginalised children of the suburban neighbourhood Ledine in Belgrade have contributed to the historic inscription rate of first-graders in the local primary school. After almost a decade of separating children as ours and theirs, a new generation of parents recognised the importance of attending the local school, thus laying a foundation for growing together for both formalised and marginalised children and furthering community development.
Schoolaboratory 007 is special also because it has inaugurated The Dream Path – a new playscape co-designed and built with children of the area in the framework of the RE: Play Project. Further supported by the Smart Balkans Fund and the Ministry of Culture, the summer school left tangible traces of play that occupied the last resort of public space in the area in the last three years – the schoolyard – transforming it into a unique, nature-inspired, community-based playscape. This joint action to sensitisation and diversification of both species and human relations has improved who we are in the world and strengthened our social tissue – as an indispensable quality for local change.
Being more attuned to each other and to the world around us, we celebrated the start of the new school year with a traditional ŠKARNEVAL throughout the neighbourhood that ended up on the path of our collective dream!
photos by Škograd
