Mellem Education is an organisation that provides educational experiences in the form of trainings and workshops, meant to challenge the individual on their role in a group decision-making process. From schools to NGOs to companies, Mellem Education’s goal is for each person to recognize and experience every individual’s equal right to freedom. By reflecting on our responsibility in this process, we continuously challenge the system in which we function and work towards building a better society from the bottom up.
Mellem’s work focuses in the space between people, cultures and conversations to become aware of our boundaries and barriers and set ourselves free of them. By setting ourselves free of our own boundaries, we set the other free of theirs too. So often we externalise that which we wish to resolve, approaching societal issues as something outside of ourselves. Mellem’s work focuses on looking within, creating the link between the personal and the political. To have a peaceful world, we must first know peace in ourselves.
Mellem offers a variety of strategies including the Betzavta methodology, a way to look at how democracy works (or does not work) in a small group. Topics covered include democratic decision-making, minorities/majorities, conflict over limited resources, intercultural communication. The natural group dynamics inform the discussions and reflections, making the training about the people in the group itself, as opposed to a study of other democratic systems. The activities explore the space between what we say and how we behave, in order to gain a better understanding and awareness of ourselves. The trainings are dynamic, filled with the ups and downs of a group process – at times light-hearted and amusing, other times tense and conflictive. All components, including the uncomfortable ones, are able and allowed to be expressed, and rather than taking the approach of ‘fixing a problem’, the facilitator allows the group to use these moments to look deeper into ourselves, our insecurities and our projections.
Throughout most of our lives, we have sat in schools and other institutions and got programmed to learn things in a certain way. The educational methodology here is participant-driven, in that the hierarchical nature of traditional teaching is dissolved. We deconstruct and construct our own learning, thereby gaining a fundamental and in-depth knowledge of ourselves. We learn together, through the experience.