3 Findings from the evaluation of the pilot workshops

In order to evaluate the pilot workshops conducted in Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Poland, Spain, North Macedonia and the UK between 2020 and 2022, the RETOPEA team asked participating young people to give feedback, both in the form of anonymous questionnaires, as well as in the context of semi-structured focus-group interviews.

The vast majority of young people who took part in the evaluation of these workshops said they enjoyed the process of making a docutube and felt they learned a lot from it. They liked, for example, that filmmaking is a very hands-on process and enjoyed learning about other people’s opinions and expressing their own views. They fed back that they really appreciated the opportunity the workshops gave them to form and express their own opinions and that they felt inspired to think more about the role of religion in society in the past and present. Many said that it was important to them to work with others in a relaxed, but respectful atmosphere, and that they appreciated and enjoyed the fact that the workshops ‘created a sort of safe space to speak out’.

Findings from the evaluation of the workshops also indicate that far from being a distraction, the filmmaking process can stimulate deeper learning and reflection compared to conventional classroom discussion as it involves hands-on and creative engagement with the learning materials. Some docutubes that were made in the context of the pilot workshops did not explicitly refer to the RETOPEA clippings. However, in their feedback, many young people said that working with the clippings had inspired them to think about how religious diversity is represented and reflected in their own environment, their own school, their own community group or their own city.