UCL Global Citizenship Programme Partnering with Economy
We are students from University College London, attending the two-week UCL Global Citizenship Programme (Active Citizenship Strand). The aim of the program is to engage in the global issues and make a difference. It’s our honour to work with Economy.
Economy is a charity aiming to use jargon-free language to explain economics to the general public and partner with media, academia, and politicians to promote simpler language in reporting economics so that citizens can make more well-informed decisions and engage in democracy better.
We aimed to achieve two objectives during our placement in Economy. The first thing is to increase user-engagement in Economy’s Facebook page and closed group, promoting a sense of community so that more people are willing to engage in economics and more likely to be empowered in democracy. That’s also one of the aims of active global citizenship — actively engage in issues around us and make a change. The second thing is to promote the free crash course in economics, which aims to impart comprehensible knowledge of economics to the general public.
Day 1, May 30th: Introduction
On day one, Joe gave us a brief introduction of the ethics and objectives of Economy. We made out a rough schedule for the following days and set up our goals, such as what skills we have already had and what else we aimed to develop. We gained some basic understandings of the mission of Economy, and what we should do to help facilitate people’s engagement in economics.
Day 2, May 31st: Detailed Plans
To initiate discussions on economics in our social media and promote people’s enrolment in the free economics crash course, we decided to interview some people in the local community near the venue of the crash course, Victoria Park, and see how they understand some economic terminologies. Then we would make some video clips, post them on the Facebook page and closed group to initiate the discussion on certain economic topics. We made a detailed plan for the interview, such as the target groups, interview questions, and how to invite people to do the video interview. We are so grateful to Cassandra who gave us a lot of advice on how to initiate the interview, how to deal with contingencies, and how to modify the questions, etc. We came up with three topics, namely, GDP, mortgage, and banks. Under each topic, there were a number of questions, varying in difficulties, to see how much people understand and care about economics.
Day 3, June 1st: Interview
Day three was an exciting day. It was our first time to interview “strangers”. At the very beginning, it was a bit daunting, as we were rejected and inexperienced. But later on, we finally found some people who were very happy to participate. The more we tried, the more confident we became. As we were more familiar with the procedure, we felt like we were really chatting with people about how they think of those economic issues rather than doing an interview itself. Therefore, by the end of the day, it was very fruitful, and the interviewees were very relaxed and spoke out how they truly feel about the issues. During the interview, generally people were able to talk about simple topics, but as the discussion got deeper, they were less likely to engage. Therefore, we gave out flyers and encouraged interviewees to attend our free economics crash course, through which we tried to engage more people in understanding economics. We thank Clare for providing information for the crash course.
Day 4, June 4th: Synchronising Videos
We managed to synchronise all the videos with recorded sound to make sure the sound quality was up to standard. It was our first time to use professional software, Adobe Premiere, to edit videos. It was challenging, but finally, we successfully synchronised all the videos by the end of the day.
Day 5, June 5th: Learning video editing with the guidance of Cassandra
Cassandra showed us how to edit videos using the mortgage video as an example. She made sure we understood each step before carrying on. We learned how to choose background music, making questions frame, etc. By the end of the day, we finished the first draft of the mortgage video and sent it to Joe for feedback.
Day 6, June 6th: Working individually
We made some detailed changes for the mortgage videos, such as font sizes, positions and colour (Economy’s brand colours) and some tweaks on the length of frames, etc. After this, Nana and Jennifer each carried on editing videos on GDP and banks respectively.
Except for gaining some experience in how to interview people, we cannot believe that we should learn video editing skills in these days! That was an amazing experience, as we were university students studying subjects not related to this field. Many thanks to our video editor Cassandra again. She was very patient and taught us step by step.
Day 7, June 7th: Finalising the videos and copies, doing proofreading and getting ready for presentation.
Day 7 was our final day working in Economy. With the help of Joe and our navigator Sophia, we finalised the videos and copies, did proofreading and got ready for the presentation in our university next day. Sophia inspired us to paint a bigger picture to the message we could communicate through our videos, such as whether the videos conveyed the ideas of active citizenship explicitly, whether the interviewees were representative enough, etc. In this way, we evaluate our videos more critically and made some modifications.
It was really hard to say goodbye. All of us really enjoyed the days here. Hereby we show our gratitude to Joe, Cassandra, Clare and Sophia once again. We gained a deeper insight into how to interview people, learned how to edit videos, developed more attention to details and worked cooperatively as a team. Thanks for the instructions and advice from all of you.
The video below shows what we have achieved:
