Kosovo In Transition

The Lens of Kosovar Youth A Multi-Modal EFL Project Kirsten Mashinter University of Pristina Prizren, Kosovo 43rd Annual TESOL Convention and Exhibit March 28, 2009 Denver, Colorado

mirza

Mirza Sagdati is a student at Gimnasium Gjon Buzuku. His hobbies include playing the guitar, travelling, surfing the internet, and rock music. He enjoys making jokes and having fun. He likes to take photos of his friends, unusual things, and nature because these three things make his life complete.

“I would like to present you three generations of my family. My grandmother represents the oldest generation. You can see that she is old and sick. She is sleeping and resting all the time. The second generation is represented by my mom. She is ironing and finishing the housework. And as the third and last generation, you can see me in new, modern and technical equipment, playing my guitar and using my computer. But if you look at these three pictures together, you will realize that these three generation are connected to each other. I can do the mom’s and grandmother’s jobs, I can do ironing and resting. My mom can rest, but not to play guitar or to use a computer, while my grandmother can’t iron, play guitar or use a computer.” -Mirza

Mirza Sagdati

Mirza Sagdati

Mirza Sagdati

floranda

Floranda Balaj is an 11th grade student at Gjon Buzuku. She acts, writes poetry, and is an avid reader. She enjoys taking pictures because she likes to describe and to show the positive and negative things of her city.

“Picture 1. He works hard in bad conditions. He is young and he doesn't feel good because he does hard work and bad work. He has no roof when it rains than he is going to be wet and dirty. He works alone. Picture 2. The grandfather and the child! The oldest and the youngest man in the family always go together and they love nature. They look happy! Picture 3. Here is my class. Like we, we are very noisy. The class is always messy, but we enjoy so much with each other. Teachers never agree with us, maybe for differences of ages and they are older than us. However we respect all of them.” -Floranda

Floranda Balaj

Floranda Balaj

Floranda Balaj

selda

Selda Hađži attends Gjon Buzuku Gimnasium. She likes to listen to pop music and to go out with her friends. A friendly, social, and special student, she likes to take pictures of nature in special moments because her pictures present real beauty.

“These pictures present a difference between my generation and parents’ generation. In the first picture it's my mum and she doesn’t go out often, maybe once a month. You’ll see in the second photo, unlike my mother, I'm with my friends sitting in a coffee-bar where I go everyday after school. Additionally, there is a difference in the type of music that we listen to. In the third picture is my brother who always uses the computer. However, my parents never turn the computer on. These are a few differences between me and my parents.” -Selda

Selda Hadzi

Selda Hadzi

Selda Hadzi

amel

Amel Huseini attends high school in Prizren and is in the 11th class. His hobbies are playing computer games and walking in nature. He loves to take photographs with the camera, but he does not like to be the object of the photograph.

“Most of my free time is spent using my computer for purposes such as chatting with friends, surfing the internet, watching films, and playing games. On the other hand, my parents always watch TV. Sometimes they don't catch a scene on the TV and they get little nervous. In this type of situation, I always tell them to use a computer because, with it, you can always pause, save, or rewind a scene that you didn't catch. The TV doesn't take care did you caught all the things or not.” -Amel

Amel Huseini

Amel Huseini

Amel Huseini

fati

Fati Pajko goes to Gjon Buzuku. For fun, he plays sports, reads science books, and listens to music. As a hobby, he also enjoys taking photographs because he wants to make every scene that he finds interesting able to be with him forever.

“As you can see on the photographs, the differences are too much. The generation of my parents and my generation is too different. The first and main difference is time. With this word I mean the way of living and life conditions. What did I mean with “The way of living”? I meant that my father and mom other lived a different life if we match with my life. They always lived in fear and under somebody’s influence. Beside that they had a big respect to their parents, which this feeling of respect is missing nowadays and maybe this is one of the reasons why we fight with our parents, who deserves everything in this life. The photographs will tell you life conditions of me and my parents. In their time, even colour pictures didn’t exist, but in my time even the digital cameras exist. This was just a simple example which shows the difference between generations. “Man is punished to be free.” -Jean Paul Sartre” -Fati

Fati Pajko

Fati Pajko

Fati Pajko

anida

Anida Aliti is a student at Gimnasium Gjon Buzuku. She enjoys reading a good book as well as listening to music. She uses photography to express herself.

“With these pictures I’ll present to you our school system. Usually there are students who more or less learned; quiet and noisy pupils; gabbers and shy pupils; smokers and non-smokers. I think that the school is for interesting students, who want to work and to learn something, but not for smokers in classrooms. All professors have the same system, to teach, to explain, to ask students and to give marks. Theirs is to share their knowledge, and ours is to learn.” -Anida

Anida Aliti

Anida Aliti

Anida Aliti

adonis

Adonis Kerhanaj goes to Gymnasium Gjon Buzuku. He likes to surf the internet, talk on the telephone, take pictures, and go to cafes. He enjoys photography because it is a beautiful feeling to see something beautiful on the page.

“With these three pictures I tried to show the differences and the commonalities between our young and the older generation of my parents. As a characteristic of our generation, I chose the computer and the access to the Internet, which is an actual thing nowadays. While as a characteristic of the older generation, I chose the baking. A thing that we, the younger generation, don’t do yet. And at last as something common between the generations I chose the card games.” -Adonis

Adonis Keranhaj

Adonis Keranhaj

Adonis Kerhanaj

egzona

Egzona Gjinovci attends Ymer Prizreni and is in the 11th grade. Her hobbies include dancing, reading psychology books, listening to rock music, and taking pictures. She enjoys taking pictures because they help her to describe the things on her mind. Additionally, she likes to tell via pictures the beautiful things which people often cannot see.

“Picture 1. When I am happy I like to make my face ugly and then to be photographed. This makes me and my friends happy. It is good when people are happy and they feel comfortable with themselves, doing things without insecurities. Through this picture I want to deliver the following message "Be happy with yourself and let the insecurity go away…" Picture 2. One of the valuable things in our life is to have good friends. To maintain good friends for a long time, we must have respect and confidence for each other, to support each other at the hard times, also too we need to be open minded and to accept the weakness which sometimes friendship have because “perfection doesn't exist.” Otherwise, we may remain without good friends. Picture 3. Young people have their dreams, and desires to make those dreams come true. I have a wish as well someday to be famous. At the same time, I want to remember my good friends. I want to remain myself. Based on attitude, everybody shows their personality and their modesty. Everyone of us has our individual style and modesty. Young people understand each other and we spend our time very good together.” -Egzona

Egzona Gjinovci

Egzona Gjinovci

Egzona Gjinovci

onur

Onur Kasimlar is a 10th grade student at Gjon Buzuku high school in Prizren. He has taken musical education on the piano, guidar, and solffegio. Additionally, Onur enjoys music, joking with people, and photography. He enjoys taking pictures because he likes to make immortal the beauties that he sees.

“It ain’t easy to explain or describe the difference from past, until now. Especially to explain this and kind of these topics with just three pictures, makes works difficult. The difference and developments between generations is keeping continuity. Example: computers have replaced typewriters, telephones have replaced telegraphs… and lots of examples like them. The tool that I produce as an image in the first picture, a leftover from Ottoman culture. The biggest proof is the crescent that you’re seeing at the top of the tool. (At that time, ‘the crescent’ was a symbol of the Ottoman Empire.) They used the tool for warming up. They open the cover and firing so they get warmed the place that they are in. but nowadays technology doesn’t let people to use this and this kind of tools. Anyway, it is dangerous to use them indoors; so contemporary community is using modern technology. For getting warmed community is using technologic wonder, which we called air-conditioners, and which is useful for warming, energy saving, also for reliability.

Nevertheless, the women in the second picture are cooking coffee which is important Turkish habit too. Today we called this Turkish coffee. But macchiato, cappuccino and the other kinds of coffees substitute of Turkish coffee habit. And the tool that they are using for cooking is a kind of the tool of first picture. Also if we look the dresses on women, we’ll see that it is not linked with nowadays dresses. At that time women wore plentiful and conservative dresses, but today ladies are wearing tights and dresses that does not have connection with conservatism. At the third picture, clothes are attracting attention again. Beside the women, men wore plentiful clothes too. Also their hat which we called fez is attracting attention. If we look at the picture carefully, we’ll see that the ground arises from little stones and you can see the Ottoman’s architecture. At the background there is a that times modern, and the most developed transport tool, which we called now Payton. As the others, technologic wonders like cars, buses, planes substitute for paytons, too. I hope you are proud of our culture and traditions. I implore all of you to claim our culture and traditions.” -Onur

Onur Kasimlar

Onur Kasimlar

Onur Kasimlar

rinor

Rinor Gashi

Rinor Gashi

Rinor Gashi