POLISH-UKRAINIAN INTEGRATION THROUGH EDUCATION AND ART

The Poles Union Foundation organizes educational programs and artistic residences for children and artists from Ukraine in Poland. It is reported by Upmp.news with reference to Polish Radio.

The Kyiv Poles Union Foundation was established in 2014 as a result of expanding the activity of the Union of Poles in Kyiv. The purpose of the fund is to establish an intercultural dialogue between young people from Poland and Ukraine, support and development of science and art, and enrich the knowledge of the inhabitants of the country over the Dnipro about the culture, history and language of Poland. The organization is engaged in the implementation of a number of projects and programs. The representatives of the organization told us about some of them.

Since 2015, the Foundation of the Union of Poles in Kyiv has been registered over Wisla to expand its activities and improve project implementation. The Foundation is engaged in educational, cultural, artistic, historical and research programs. Among other things, from 2015, the organization will develop an educational program that allows students, particularly from Ukraine, to study in high schools and technical schools in Poland.

Today more than 150 children from the upon-the-Dnipro Region are there under the tutelage of the foundation. Children are located in two parts of Poland – in the town of Pulawi and in the village of Klémentowice in Lublin Voivodship.

The Foundation collaborates with numerous schools in Pulawi County, which adapt the educational offer to the challenges of the modern world, which should facilitate students entering asylum specialties in higher education institutions in the country over the Vistula. According to the head of the Foundation of the Union of Poles of Kyiv, Vladislav Zvarych, children from Ukraine are adapting to study and life in Poland rather quick, unlike the elders.

At the same time, according to Olga Bochkar, Project Coordinator of the Kyiv City Poles Union Foundation, the artistic, cultural and other organization programs arose as a result of studying of Ukrainian children in Poland. She notes that, for example, Warsaw, Wroclaw, Gdansk, and Krakow are very multicultural cities, where, regardless of the nationality of the student, pupil, worker or resident, all, for the most part, are absorbed by the mass society and the infrastructure of the metropolises. The situation is rather different in smaller towns.

The next stage of the development of the educational program and the Foundation’s activities in small areas in the east of Poland became stays for artists from Ukraine who created their own art projects and presented them to the local school and community in Klementovice, where about 80 children from Ukraine study. The first two large projects with the participation of Ukrainian artists took place in cooperation with the International Symposium of Contemporary Art “Biruchiy” and a complex of Agribusiness Schools named after Rattling.

Taras Andrukhovich