User View: Distance learning about freedom

For Black History Month, NVCEG partnered with video conferencing and collaboration vendor, DTEN to deliver an inspiring virtual workshop to 30 classrooms across 14 schools.

In October 2023, over 600 Year 6 and Sixth form pupils based across the UK, Poland, New York and Taiwan, joined the series of meetings, organised by the National Video Conferencing in Education Group, to celebrate the annual observance and hear from inspirational speaker, none other than Nelson Mendala’s former bodyguard, Chris Lubbe.

NVCEG’s mission is to connect classrooms across the globe and to the wider community, to raise attainment and aspirations for young people and give them a global voice. “DTEN enabled us to achieve this with the Black History Month Workshop. We were grateful for the company’s support and its technology worked with such ease. Without DTEN’s participation, the students wouldn’t have had the opportunity to learn first hand from Chris and discuss how they could challenge racism,” said NVCEG’s chair, Mina.

In these interactive sessions, Lubbe used a DTEN ME Pro desktop device to share his personal experiences and learnings from his nine years working with Nelson Mendala. He shared content, annotated his presentation and told stories from his childhood during the time of apartheid, as well as discussing ways to prevent racism in schools. Pupils were able to ask Chris questions and engage with their peers from other schools using the video conferencing tools available.

Selborne Primary School in West London were amongst those who attended the workshop, joining the session via a DTEN D7X 55in All-in-One device connected to its existing classroom screen.

Overall, the event was a huge success with pupils leaving the classroom educated, inspired and motivated to make a difference. One pupil summarised their feedback on the event, stating: “It was really fun. The message he taught around peace and forgiveness is very inspiring and I learnt that nobody should be discriminated against, as it can be life threatening.”

“Chris’ messages of forgiveness, understanding and standing up to racism are more important than ever. Helping take this message in an engaging way to hundreds of children without having to travel across the country and internationally is very powerful,” said Doug Remington, GM, head of EMEA at DTEN. “It was a very inspirational session from Chris Lubbe with great participation and thoughtful questions and comments from the children at Selborne Primary School and the other schools taking part.”

Mina Patel concluded: “Not only did the session help raise an extremely important topic but it also helped to develop our next global workforce, who will be working with video conferencing technologies in their future.”