Two students from a school in the UK will be speaking about the Gallipoli campaign at an international conference in Germany on 19/20th February 2015.
Adam Connor and Jake Young travelled to Turkey in November 2014 through the Gallipoli Centenary Education Project. They were among a group of teenagers from Bay House School in Gosport, Hampshire, who spent three days visiting the battlefields.
They’ve now won places to attend a First World War education conference in the Rhineland town of Oberhausen, joining students working on projects in France, Germany, Italy, and Romania.
The focus will be on how and why we commemorate the 1914-18 conflict, a century on.
The event is being organised by the Rhineland Industry Museum, in the industrial heartland of Germany where so much of the weaponry used in the war was made.
Setting out the themes, the conference organisers note: “In 2014, all the European states are remembering the ‘Great Catastrophe’ of the last century. How is this event being interpreted in the different European regions? How is the public commemoration arranged? How do the forms of commemoration differ? What do the children and youth associate with the occasion of remembrance?
“The centrepiece of the conference is an international student convention. Together with their teachers, pupils from several different countries in Europe will present their school projects about the First World War, its reasons and consequences.”
Gosport students Adam Connor,17, and Jake Young,16, are both skilled in drama and will be developing a dialogue performance for the event, which runs alongside an academic conference exploring issues around commemoration.
They are travelling with their Headteacher, Ian Potter, and the National Coordinator of the Gallipoli Centenary Education Project, Robin Clutterbuck.
You can watch a film about the school’s visit to Gallipoli on the website of the Gallipoli Centenary Education Project.
The Project is working with schools and museums in the UK and the other countries which fought at Gallipoli in 1915: Turkey, France, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, India, Canada and Germany. Funded by the UK Heritage Lottery Fund and the Gallipoli Association, it runs until spring 2016.
Information & pictures supplied by the Gallipoli Centenary Education Project.
Posted by: Peter Alhadeff, Centenary News