Our network of five partner schools from five European countries (Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain and Turkey) intends to tackle the topic of discrimination. The reason for this is as simple as it is significant: Unfortunately even in the united Europe of the 21st century we are still confronted with EXCLUSION and even with obvious DISCRIMINATION. It does not matter whether it is psychological, mental or physical, whether the reason for exclusion is religious, racial or sexual – discrimination is generally to be opposed. Together we want to improve the inclusion of different persons or whole groups in our concrete surrounding.Our process can be described as follows:We will divide the central topic into five ISSUES. Each semester (except the first one) will be dedicated to one of these issues.Issue N° 1 (Spring 2017): No barriers for handicapped – Ways of better integrating disabled personsIssue N° 2 (Autumn 2017): Exclusion of ethnic minorities – Protection of those who are a minority in their own countryIssue N° 3 (Spring 2018): Freedom of faith – Protection of the right to freely practice one’s religion and the protection of persons of different faithIssue N° 4 (Autumn 2018): Stop gender discrimination – Ways of fighting sexism and standing for equal opportunitiesIssue N° 5 (Spring 2019): Stop racism: Breaking down prejudices and stopping discrimination of immigrants. Ways of better integrating those who migrated into our societies from different culturesEach semester starts with LOCAL PROJECT WORK and research activities: According to the issue, our students will investigate simultaneously to what extent equal treatment and equal opportunities are realized in their own environment: a) Students will self-study and describe specific examples of discrimination and they will present a concrete story of a chosen person or group to other students in their school.b) From these concrete examples (letter a) each school will choose one specific story, which will be followed in the next part.c) Next step is to provide deep information about the specific story (letter b) and prepare concrete activities with/for discriminated parts of the society. We hope not only for PR materials coming out of this project, but for real impact for excluded groups or persons.On the basis of their own experience obtained in the first part (local project work) students will then in INTERNATIONAL ACTIVITIES discuss and exchange the ideas of possible actions, which could lead to better conditions for locally excluded parts of the society. Therefore they will make use of eTwinning and other means of digital communication. And there are foreseen five INTERNATIONAL STUDENT MEETINGS (activities C1-C5) each hosted by a different partner:C1 Spring 2017 – No barriers for handicapped – Elda/SpainC2 Autumn 2017 – Ethnic minorities – Debrecen/HungaryC3 Spring 2018 – Freedom of faith – Manisa/TurkeyC4 Autumn 2018 – Gender discrimination – Marsala/ItalyC5 Spring 2019 – Stop racism – Fürth/GermanyThe school hosting the event will develop a program suited for the respective issue . The focal point of the meetings shall be the presentation of the results reached during the first phase (local project work). Ideally the students will not only compare the situations in different countries, but also exchange information on best-practice ideas for integration and inclusion. Each semester ends with a local DISSEMINATION PHASE: The students and teachers that have participated in the international meeting as representatives of their respective schools will develop means of disseminating the results of these meetings in their national schools, e.g. in the form of an exhibition, presentation or school event. Ideally the local dissemination activities are coordinated to the activities that take place at other partner schools.What are the most important priorities and objectives addressed by our project?One of the main factors, which hinder faster integration of European aims and politics, is the fear of the foreign. This is, in combination with the economic downturn across Europe over the last few years, likely to be a base for a comeback of nationalism and boundaries in different forms. We have to attack this fear head on, try to distinguish between “foreign” and “unknown” and lead our young people to know each other. During the project approximately 200-300 students and 40-60 teachers will exchange views on specific fields of discrimination.But why about discrimination? Disadvantaged learners; disparities in learning outcomes; high number of early school leavers – all of us are confronted with these kinds of problems either in Spain, Italy, Germany, Hungary or Turkey. That’s why we want to inspire each other in finding ways of how to reduce disparities. That’s why we are deeply convinced that our school partnership is in full concordance with the EU policy priority of an inclusive education.
A. Context and background of the project: In the strategy paper EUROPE 2020 the EU members set the goal to achieve an INCLUSIVE EDUCATION in our countries, that is to say an education of equal opportunities. According to this priority, we carried out in the last 36 months an ambitious Erasmus+ KA2 School Partnership, which focused on the topic of discrimination. More precisely, we approached this issue by working on four sub-topics: Subtopic N° 1: No barriers for handicapped – Ways of better integrating disabled persons. Subtopic N° 2: Stop the exclusion of ethnic minorities – Protection and integration of those who are a minority in their own country because of language or culture. Subtopic N° 3: Stop gender discrimination – Ways of fighting sexism and standing for equal opportunities. Subtopic N° 4: Stop racism – Breaking down prejudices and stopping discrimination of immigrants. Our network of four partner schools (from Germany, Hungary, Italy and Spain) tackled the topic of discrimination by various activities. The reason for this is as simple as significant: Unfortunately, even in the united Europe of the 21st century we are still confronted with EXCLUSION. It does not matter whether it is psychological, mental or physical, whether the reason for discrimination is religious, racial or sexual – it is generally to be opposed. This project’s main priority was therefore to stand up against discrimination and fight it. B. Main objectives and main activities of the project: The main goal of this Erasmus+ KA2 partnership was to make visible to our students the different types of discrimination existing in our society and to raise awareness among the students so that they can remove the barriers which make fully inclusion not possible. This goal has been developed through different learning and teaching activities related to the four subtopics and through particular core themes in each of the four International Student Meetings (ISM): About disabled in Elda (April 2017), about ethnic minorities in Debrecen (October 2017), about gender equality in Marsala (March 2018) and about racism and migration in Fürth (December 2018). We dealt with these themes through a full range of varied activities, which have been carried out by our students. In total, more than 60 students participated in ISM and more than 150 students created exhibitions, videos, interviews, informative panels, dramatizations, comics, story boards and so on. Moreover, these results of tasks carried out by our students were not only presented in the four ISM (see above), but also in plenary sessions in front of some classes or even in front of the whole educational community of each participating school, so that a larger audience was reached. C. Results and impact attained by the project: Today, we can proudly declare that the stated goals have been achieved: First, because we’ve managed to make visible particular groups that suffer the impacts of discrimination in all the educational communities of the participating schools. Second, because we raised awareness among all members of the educational community about the fact that we can eliminate discrimination and that is why we should take measures. We have achieved that actions against discrimination have started beyond our educational community by means of wide dissemination of the results in the locality and in the particular region. This has been succeeded thanks to the involvement of external agents (local authorities, education administration, mass media, other educational institutions, cultural institutions and non-profit organisations) These multiple effects have been reached thanks to the great quality of the products produced (some of them being very professional), which constitute a corpus of didactic-cultural materials of great value, like Samuel´s video (whose main character is a disabled student from IES Monastil) and which was presented in different forums about disability. D. Long-term benefits of the project Some of the produced didactic materials had a great acceptance and they were disseminated in other education centres, like e.g. the “Cinderello” comic, which was edited by the Government Department of Education of Elda. Likewise, it has been of great importance the dissemination of these cultural products through social media and the websites of the four schools. Last but not least, the final achievement was the creation of a BOARD GAME. Similar to Trivial Pursuit, the main topic of the Stick Together Game is discrimination. It has been written in English and materialized in a pack (box, board, instructions and tokens) and professionally produced by an enterprise of graphic arts. 500 copies of this game have been edited and distributed among the members of the project and at the same time these ones will distribute them among different institutions, cultural and educational associations in their own cities.