SNDO Care Document
Building and maintaining a caring and safe(r) school culture
The SNDO Care document is written in May 2022 by SNDO mentors Noha Ramadan, Joy Mariama Smith, Bruno Listopad, Ana Vujanović, production coordinator Chantal Mooij and artistic director Bojana Mladenović processing the conversations with the 2019-2020 SNDO students. The work started on the proposal of Joy Mariama Smith and within the SNDO Critical whiteness research trajectory, vol 2. from 2018. The work on the document knows several phases, first the core team exploration and embracing of the idea of creating such a document, then in 2019-2020 holding several SNDO Parliament sessions with the team and students to give and collect first inputs, thinking and languages around the notions which the doc pertains to address.
The 2020 pandemic radically reshuffled the priorities and so the care became of different order in the school. The topics did not disappear, quite the contrary, they may have become even more pertinent, but the labor around communal writing of it got postponed. In March 2022, the dialogue was picked up and in May the first draft emerged.
A joyful and meaningful study environment
The aim of the document is to communicate some of the basic premises, which are meant to create a joyful and meaningful study environment for everyone involved – students, teachers, guests, the team and support staff.
Different chapters address different topics that are at play and have been identified as needing everyone’s attention and care. The language of the document is meant to address everyone at once, however, when needed there is direct address of students only or teachers only to remove ambiguity and speak of important things in direct ways.
We hope that this occasional directness of language will be welcomed and that even if some of the topics and invitations pose a challenge for the community, this will be received and understood in a way it is meant- to help everyone grow, be their best possible version in this environment and find joy, pleasure and affirmation through engagement with these topics. Ethics of fairness and equal access are the basic underlying principles on which SNDO as department and its program stand on. Likewise, these are the driving forces behind the creation of this document and determine its contents and directions.
