Alex Pritz: An Exploration of Cross-Cultural Education
Alex Pritz is a third year McGill student studying in the School of the Environment. His involvement with the student film collective ‘Developing Pictures’ drew Alex to Haiti and Kenya where he started his career as an amateur filmmaker. Since then, he has gone on to initiate the iWastology Project.
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ABOUT Alex Pritz
“Alex Pritz sees film and multimedia as a powerful tool for raising awareness and creating change both in the classroom and in the field. He said that the inspiration for iWastology came from a discussion with Arcie Mallarie of Sauvé Scholars, the programme that brings 14 remarkable young leaders to McGill each year.
Arcie Mallarie is the Founder and President of Silid Aralan (‘Learning Room’), an education programme that has changed the lives of thousands of underprivileged and academically-challenged students in Mallarie’s native Philippines by mobilising parents, teachers, Government and the private sector.
Alex joined Arcie in the Philippines in July, 2011 to launch iWastology. iWastology (‘iwasto’ in the Filipino language of Tagalog means ‘to fix’) aims to generate classroom-to-classroom discussions with the help of technology (video, but also Skype). It was designed so that the children living in the Philippines could produce videos that answer questions asked by the St. George’s students and vice versa so that each group discovered the reality of the other.
Alex then met up with Elliott, his co-fellow later that summer to start a chapter of the project in Nairobi. They wanted to hear the stories of the children living in slums. Better yet, they wanted to teach the kids how to tell their story themselves through video. ”
The VIDEO
1. Twitter 2. Website: Iwastology Project 3. Website: Developing Pictures
