Danish artist Stine Marie Jacobsen has been invited to develop a long-term project with schools in Marseille. The project titled Group-Think evolved after meeting with teachers, students and professionals of formal and non-formal education.

These conversations inspired her to explore the potential of citizenship education in a moment of multiple students’ mobilisations in Marseille and the world. Group-Think seeks to expand the current formal education programme at schools by implementing training techniques in nonviolent civil protest, first aid, and collective intelligence skills.

This educational programme, which could be implemented as part of a sports, art, or other class involving physical activity, consists of a series of exercises that stimulate collective intelligence, patience, preparedness, good reflexes, violence prevention, urban resilience, verbal negotiation, responsibility, resistance, coping strategies, first aid, and group safety in protest gatherings.

As an addition to current sports programmes in schools, Group-Think seeks to introduce a creative sports programme with exercises that connect individual and group minds in order to heighten solidarity, improvisation, and thinking skills. Group-Think aims at preparing young people to take care of themselves and others through collective actions. By training students in collective intelligence, solidarity, resilience, self-care and community-care, they’ll be able to better protect each other in mass gatherings.

These exercises were cowritten and tested together with eighty Marseille school students and circus artists from the project’s partner Archaos.

The project resulted in a film that was screened in a cabin on the rooftop of Coco Velten and in a handbook that has been distributed among 102 local schools and is available online for free, or as a publication for sale.