Viajando con el circo

Introducing circus skills to children since school

The collaborative project Viajando con el circo -Traveling with the circus-stands out as a way to introduce circus skills and gymnastics through collaboration between schools from different parts of Spain. It allows children from different ages and backgrounds to discover and experience circus arts, and to exchange experiences using new technologies applied to education such as blogger, youtube or Edmodo.

This project was born from a previous collaboration, in which several physical education teachers, who met by Twitter, decided to make a collaborative project with PE recycled materials. After this successful experience, they decided to continue to work with students other useful values: circus seemed to be, with its multiple skills, expressions and creativity, a perfect way to do so. It started in 2011 and still goes on until today. From the beginning, social media were very important to reach our aims and get in touch with our target, students. We created a blog to publicize, explain what we wanted to do and campaigned on Facebook, Twitter, and Google +.

We seek the widest possible dissemination by publishing performances and presentations of the schools that have participated in the project through the blog and our YouTube channel. We also try to share between schools any material published, created or generated by other partner schools; it was essential too to involve students’ families in order to cover as many people as possible. In addition, each participant usually has its own video channel. So, in a nutshell, we focused on the possibilities of social media –and the knowledge that the students, digital natives, already have about how to use them- to spread the blog, the YouTube channel and to broadcast on social networks our activities.

Our real objective wasn’t to increase audiences in numbers; we didn’t want to reach the greatest number of people/students/teachers from the beginning. Our true goal was to develop an educational approach through circus, showing our work through social media. The astonishing results of the students’ work undeniable contributed to the dissemination of the project on social networks, giving notoriety and also allowing us to reach a larger audience. This focused dissemination strategy has given us the opportunity to meet and get in touch with other people who wanted to replicate and develop the project or simply share with us suggestions and compliments about it.