MEMORY OF OUR COMMUNITY

1. Starting game: when and where? The teacher prepares a set of cards. On one part of these, they will write about recent historical calamitous events (relating to the recent decades), on the remaining part, they will write the places where these events took place. The cards will be placed on a table in the centre. The class will be divided into 2 groups and will have to link the events and places together. The winner is the group which guesses the most correct matches in the shortest time.

2. The actual activity is introduced. The teacher suggests that an interview is carried out with one or more local people. The questions will concern various aspects related to times of emergency and will refer to historical facts that the people interviewed experienced first-hand. They will be divided into 3 stages: preparation for the event, management during the emergency, the phase following the emergency.

Below are some stimulus questions to help with structuring the interviews:

• Was the community ready to face the emergency?
• Were there any organisations that dealt with the prevention of emergencies?
• How did you react to the event? how did people around you react?
• What feelings do you associate with that event? E.g. sounds, smells, colours...
• How was the emergency phase dealt with?
• How did the community deal with the event?
• in your opinion, what measures would have been necessary to limit the effects of this calamitous event?

3. Choose a person and submit the questions - Activities to be carried out individually. The interview can be transcribed in order to work on the text afterwards.

4. Return to the class. The interviewees’ answers are reported in the class. The teacher asks students to write down the most frequently recurring words in the interviewees' stories.

Depending on the type of interview and the people involved, this activity is very versatile because it can be focused on many different aspects and on the impacts that a significant event can have on the local area and the environment, and on society. You can decide to structure an interview process involving different people or organisations and associations that deal with emergencies. This can result in the creation of hashtags, starting from the texts of the interviews, to establish a link between past and present and on how it was recounted before and how an emergency is recounted today.