Video: Edwin's life at UWC Red Cross Nordic

The video is made by Elio Alonso Vasquez Miranda, studying at UWC Red Cross Nordic.

Get up Stand Up: Land mine victims at RCN

Together with the Norwegian Red Cross, Haugland Rehabiltation Centre and HIFUS, the College is offering a two year program for education and rehabilitation for Land Mine Victims. From 2012 this program will be supported financially by the Norwegian Foreign Ministry.

Tesfahunegn Sima (Ethiopia) and Edwin Gonzales (Nicaragua) are the first two participants.

In October Tesfa and Edwin helped out at the annual “TV-aksjonen” – the biggest annual national fundraising campaign in Norway, which this year was for Norsk Folkehjelp and their campaign for clearing land from land mines. In the NRK studio they were interviewed by celebrities Erik Thorstvedt and Haddy N’Djie about their own personal experience. Tesfa and Edwin told about the fatal moments in their lives, when they as children paid the price for being close to exploding bombs. The two boys have moved on to gain strength independence in life. It has been a dream for them to come to Norway, to gain their scholarship at UWC Red Cross Nordic and get engaged in all kinds of activities with fellow students from all over the world. And as they grow and learn the two of them wants to be contributors for creating a better future. “Be Hope” is the artist name Tesfa is using as a singer and indeed the name many of his fellow students use when talking to him. On their way from the TV studio, Tesfa and Edwin were introduced to the Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg. On Campus students did their own fundraising for this campaign. In Førde and Dale they joined in with locals in door to door collection for the same purpose.

Click HERE and go to time 23:20 to wacth the interview

This article was originally written by Arne Osland for the the 2011-12 UWC Red Cross Nordic annual report.

Video: Feng's story of coming to RCN

In this presentation, Feng from China talked about his experiences with coming to UWC Red Cross Nordic. Here are two videos of him answering questions from the participants:

Were you scared to come to RCNUWC alone?


What can we do to help someone who has a disability?

Workshop: Being disabled in class

Almost 1 in 7 people has some limits to mobility.

This physical disabilities workshop at UWC Red Cross Nordic started with all participants being blindfolded, because a visual impairment is the most common physical disability. They were sent into a classroom on their own, where they one by one had to find a seat. After this they were paired up and from only hearing the sentence "they see me rollin' they hatin'" they had to guess who their partner was. Finally, they got to take off the blind-folds and see if they were right. 

Apart from this, last week was perception week at Red Cross Nordic, with more workshops on visual impairments and a lot of students challenged themselves and tried going 'blind' for a day.

Following was a presentation of different physical disabilities as well as the Norwegian law that everyone should have an equal accessibility to facilities.

The workshop ended with a small quiz on the newly gained knowledge and a presentation from a disabled RCN student, telling about his experiences here.

Here is a video from the workshop:

How to make Red Cross Nordic more accessable

The following is a resume of the points made during a series of group discussions with students and teachers on how to make UWC Red Cross Nordic more disability friendly:

• Points raised:
• Smart Boards are good, but we need more of them
• Electronic doors need more attention and we need more education on how to use them. Why do they break? When do they break?
• Students are open minded and helpful
• Not all building are accessible. For example: Denmark House, Cantina, student houses, second floors, K-Building
• We need education on how to help, what to do, terminology, and information on specific cases
• Information about and from students and staff with disabilities
• Teachers should put more effort into supporting students
• The school should accept more people with disabilities, but only if they have the necessary facilities
• Snow shoveling should be handled better and by more people
• Does the school follow Norwegian law? Does the school receive money from the government to make things accessible? And if so where is the money going?
• We need more Info about Norwegian laws and finances
• Pathways are important: Student village to cantina, silent house and boat house are NOT accessible to all

• Suggestions for improvement:
• Signs to remind and explain about doors
• Salt instead of Gravel or alternative to gravel if salt is bad
• Bathroom in K-Building
• Accessibility to room K2
• Taking shoes of by door of houses to remove shoes from corridors. This also makes the houses cleaner and drier
• More light around campus
• An EAC focused on helping disabled students
• Permanent help to all who need it
• People should be hired to do the work that “volunteers” do now.
• Why are there not more volunteers and advertisers?
• Basic Training on disabilities for all students and staff: How, what, why, when
• Student Council needs to be more active on the issue
• Presentations in college meetings
• General Attitude amongst students and staff, not just physical aid
• We need more elevators
• We need more ramps

Workshop on disabilities, cultural sharing & solutions

This term's Global Concerns conference at UWC Red Cross Nordic was on discrimination with four subtopics: Ehtnic minorities, religion, women's rights and disabilities. Our workshop was named "Disabilities, cultural sharing & solutions". In the workshop we started with a country profile before the actual workshop, so the participants could se their way of thinking of disabilities before and after. In the workshop, the participants discussed the following questions in smaller groups:

• What is a disability in your culture?
• Are everybody disabled?
• Define disabilities, both physical & mental.
• Is impairment; your lack of ability to execute a task or societies lack of adjustment so you can execute a task?

While discussing the questions, many interesting perspectives came up. We showed them the universal symbol of disabilities to make them start thinking, and we heard things like, "the blind guy", "the hand language", and "the symbol of stupidity". They compared their country profiles, and came up with a couple of very important points regarding treatment of the impaired: Firstly they saw that even though you are disabled, you can't do anything about it, and you have to learn to live with it. Secondly, they saw that having a disability doesn't make you completely useless. For example, a person without legs can still program computers. Ultimately, they realized that there is discrimination against the people and there was a lot of talk about the definitions.

Thus we showed them the definitions. We gave them the opportunity to try writing down the definitions, with surprising results! The participants tended to write too specific definitions. We showed the World Health Organization's definitions, so they could compare and see where they lacked. Generally, the participants saw that they needed to be broader. In the end, they wrote new definitions and came up with a very simple version, being abnormal.

We ended the workshop by looking at the question "is impairment your lack of ability to execute a task, or societies lack of adjustment so you can execute a task?" The question was heavily discussed, and all the groups came up with a general answer: directly it is your disability that is making you impaired, but since being abnormal is part of the definition, the society sets the standards, and then they also disable you. The participants also felt that it was the society’s responsibility to make certain adjustments since the disabled also are adjusting.

Fredrik & Bernadette - RCNUWC

Blind Data: Teaching physics to blind students

About 10 years ago RCN admitted two completely blind students, Pawel from Poland and David from Spain. I’d never really met a blind person before so was quite nervous to discover that David had chosen physics HL. David had been blind from birth so all the pictures in his head were formulated from descriptions, touch and sound (not sure about smell and taste). Physics is a very visual subject, small red balls represent atoms wavy lines waves, graphs of motion, potential ‘ills and wells, not to mention the movement. How will I get all this across to a blind person?

A graph is a visual tool that is pretty useless to a blind person. I first tried using special plastic sheets that you write on with a ballpoint pen to make ridges that can be felt. This works OK, but since I don’t write Braille I had to say what the axis represent and the whole process was a bit awkward. Instead of this tactile solution I experimented with whistling the graphs. I could do linear by free whistling, but more complicated graphs were done using a slide whistle. Whatever the x axis was replaced with time then drew out the plunger to match the slope. David got pretty good at matching the graph to the whistle. Sometimes I’d get the rest of the class to close their eyes too, they weren’t bad either. I’d always toyed with the idea of making an application to reproduce graphs as a sound but never got round to it.

Graphs are also used in experiments to see if relationships are linear. David would use the data instead. He could read a column of numbers (in Braille line by line) and be able to determine if it was linear or not. This required an exceptional ability with numbers. I wonder if a sound version could work here too. If the individual points could be played over the rising notes of the best fit line maybe it would be possible to get a feel for the spread of data.

The SMART board has revolutionised physics education. What used to be a set of static images is now animating across the screen, great for sighted students useless for the blind. All the chairs in the physics lab are on wheels so whenever I needed to describe movement David would take flight. He was subjected to constant Forces, Impulse, and torque and at various times possessed momentum, velocity and acceleration. SHM was fun and resonance better, waves were difficult. For gases I could have got the whole class running about but to be honest I never did, there are limits you know.

Taking measurements was rather difficult for David. I thought it would be fine using computer interface so that values could be read from his Braille line but the software wasn’t blind friendly, and could only be navigated with a mouse. I did enquire about the possibility to adapt the software but the company said there simply wasn’t money to be made from the idea. Tut, tut. Wherever possible I tried to adapt the experiments to suit David, I remember we did Ohm’s law on his tongue and for SHM I hung a bucket from the ceiling and he measured the frequency by feeling when it touched his hand.

We experimented with many different techniques, some worked some didn’t. Sometimes he didn’t actually make it to class, on several occasions he overshot Eckbo and had to be picked out of the bushes. When this happened in the dark it was particularly bad since no one could see where he was. I’d like to develop some of these ideas further but maybe HL physics is not the best place to start. There must be something lower down the education chain that is preventing most blind students ever getting that far. Oh, and another thing, he passed!

This article is written by Chris Hamper, physics teacher at UWC Red Cross Nordic.

UWC Red Cross Nordic: Educating body and mind

In the February 2008 edition of United World we explored the work done by the Spanish national committee in partnership with the ONCE Foundation to select one disabled student a year. Most of the work done at this point was focused on selecting students who were visually impaired. UWC Red Cross Nordic has been working closely with the Haugland Rehabilitation Center that shares its campus in efforts to increase its outreach to students with other physical disabilities.

John Lawrenson, the college's Rektor, outlined the guiding principle behind this initiative, "UWC Red Cross Nordic subscribes to the fundamental Nordic belief in a society based on the principle of social solidarity - a society that gives all its citizens the right to freedom, social security and societal participation. In practice this means a culture where disabled people have equal opportunities to take part on all aspects of society and where disabled people are equal in all respects and fully integrated into their communities."

Creating access to all social and learning environments is essential in making the college accommodating for students with physical disabilities. Work has been focused on installing automatic doors to all public buildings on campus and building ramps to make these doors accessible. Paths have been widened, angles of walkways have been adjusted and one student house is being internally adapted. Bathrooms have now also been equipped with accessible facilities. "In a few cases, we have reduced the number of students in a room from five to four. We are determined to do everything we can to ensure that physical disabilities don't prohibit out students' education" says Arne Osland, Director of Development at the college. "In the future selection process, if a candidate has specific requirements due to a disability we will run an assessment so that we can make considerations about what kind of individual adaptations will need to be done, we'll then commit to making those adaptations to endure that the student can attend" Arne continues.

UWC Red Cross Nordic is now poised to begin its new initiative of selecting students who are victims of landmines. The first intake will begin in August 2011 with the selection of three students, one each from Nicaragua, Ethiopia and Vietnam. They will be selected by the national committee of their country using the same selection criteria used in standard UWC selections.

"In the preparation for the intake we have looked into how we can make use of the expertise at the Haugland Rehabilitation Center," Arne says. "A crucial part of this is to understand that our education is about giving the individual the courage and ability to expand their own limits - to achieve this there are many areas where direct support should not be given. We do not want to educate dependency, but to enable for an active life."

The landmine victim project represents a huge step forward in the college's commitment to actively recruiting students with disabilities and will play a big part in the future of that commitment. "It is our ambition that the recruitment of landmine victims shall carry on for many years and that we will recruit from a bread range of applicants," explains Arne. "This project can help to put focus on what great problems these explosives represent in many parts of the wold and will compliment the important work that the Red Cross and other organizations do in order to limit this damage."

This article was originally written for United World - April 2011