The I Am My Voice project, implemented by Tajalla, enhances children’s latent and active abilities to express themselves through singing and engaging with heritage. It values and activates the potential and abilities of trainers and communities, fostering a reciprocal learning and teaching environment between children and their surroundings. The children, trainers, and project organizers explore, utilize, and revive the inherent content of their cultural heritage and its connection to them by fostering communication with themselves, their ancestors, and their environment.
To achieve this, the project trains music instructors from various cities to coach children in choirs that represent the unique heritage of their regions. It also creates opportunities for exchanges between choirs in different cities to highlight their shared identity, the distinctiveness of each group, and the harmony that arises from this similarity and diversity. Training is conducted in partnership with local institutions and centers in each city, which are supported to host the project, children, and trainers. Tajalla aspires to sustain these relationships and the project in the long term.
Building on these efforts, the project aims to develop children’s self-awareness, amplify their voices, and strengthen their confidence and shared identity. It also seeks to honor the unique heritage of each city by integrating it into daily life, social events, and performances, fostering its exchange with others through shows and festivals. Additionally, the project creates job opportunities in the arts for trainers and highlights the role of art in enriching communities and activating their potential.
The project team contributes to preserving this musical heritage by systematically documenting, developing, and codifying it in ways suitable for training, exchange, and retrieval. This methodology is used to train children by instructors from their regions, who have been trained on both the methodology and the pedagogical approaches specific to singing, knowledge transfer, and addressing children’s training needs within this artistic initiative.
The project aims to achieve mutual benefit for all components of the cultural ecosystem it engages with, including:
- The project/institution team members
- The children being trained in the project
- Regulatory entities such as ministries and similar bodies
- The children’s families and the local community
- Trainers employed by the project, from within and outside the cities
- Cultural institutions collaborating with the project
- The education system, both locally and across cities
- Each city’s unique economic, geographic, and societal characteristics
- Partner centers in each city and the particularities of each partner
- Documented and undocumented heritage, along with its broader context
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