The world is more global every day. The speed of the changes and the increasing globalization makes it clear for us that the future our students will have to face is uncertain. Yet it will for sure demand a flexible and open mind, prepared to adjust and learn from fast changes, cultural diversity and a varied range of personalities, being able of respecting and valuating the differences at the same time that they feel proud and secure on themselves. This is what the Council of Europe considers to be the multicultural skill, which proves to be more and more important every year. Our project aims to work on the development of this skill from the foundations of education (3-8 years of age). We will do that by developing the broad vision of the teachers in the cultural issue, making them aware of the changing strategies within the schools in order to tackle the pluriculturalism.Our approach is school based and focused on every single child and every single family, with their common characteristics and their peculiarities. But it will very distinctively work on the inclusion and the empowering of the children who find it harder to fit in the mainstream and to value their own selves. This group includes:- The children who have Special Needs, due to physical, developmental or mental problems. - The children who have Learning Needs due to social situations, such as broken families or families with severe problems.- The children who have Learning Needs because they are immigrants or refugees.These three groups share a common need: they need to be naturally included in the classroom and accepted and loved by their peers.Throughout the project, the schools aim at:1.- Elaborating together a compound of contextualized activities, strategies and techniques to work on inclusion, exchanging their good practices and creating new ones by practising the dialectical approach.2.- Developing a new way of team working in a european context, sharing the common characteristics and enriching from the diversity.3.- Including in the project not only the teachers and the students, but also the families and other members of the learning community (NGO´s, external assintants, town-hall representatives....) to enrich the outcomes by making suggestions from different angles.4.- Working on a pluricultural and an open-minded social attitude on the side of the children and the staff that belong to the schools. This spirit will help them integrate better in the more european world that they are going to live in.In order for them to reach those goals, the project is based on three pillars:a) The tight coordination between the two schools together in the design, implementation and the assessment of the project. Being an "only two school" exchange of good practices makes it easier to have closer communication. That feeling of understanding started when the coordinators met each other in a previous Contact Seminar. Besides the initial coordination done for this application, it is planned to have 5 transnational meetings which will scrupoulously focus on assessing the difficulties on the implementation of the project, doing the necessary changes for the benefit of all. b) The enthusiastic participation of the teachers and the families from the schools. Before the filling in of application, it was discussed and agreed on both schools that there will be four Short-term joint staff training events, which will be the touchstone of our project. In these events, the teachers will work together first in the exchanging of good ideas/activities regarding inclusion and pluriculturalism and then, in the exchanging of the outcoming results after a mutual enrichment and a team working procedure takes place. In these events, the families will also participate as an important part to change for the better the social atmosphere of the schools.c) The use of ICT and the continuous working of the two schools teams, that will reflect on general situations and particular cases to come up with activities produced on paper or on video and shared through the webpage of each school. They will also hold regular Skype conferences to discuss common issues and use the e-twinning platform if it is needed.To assess on the results, both material (written activities and/or videos produced, supporting theories, minutes....) and proffesional (training of the teachers and the families in a multicultural mind), the coordinating schools will follow an Action-Research procedure in which the initial proposal of goals and indicators will be assessed and rearranged in a continuum so that it adjusts to the changing needs of the project. The dissemination of the project will be carried out at three levels:1º.- A basic fundamental level: learning together to live together within the schools.2º.- A medium level: sharing the knowledge with other teachers of the area.3º.- A divulgative level: information given on the local newspaper, webpages.
The Project “Learn together to live together” was developed in two Infant and Primary schools, located one of them in the flemish area of Belgium and the other in the province of Segovia, Spain. Our goals were: 1º.- To work together the two schools in order to develop methodological strategies and resources that would help with the Inclusion in early ages. 2º.- To analize and assess (through the mobilities of teachers from both schools, the exchange of videos-photos and the management meetings the tackling of Inclusion in each of the two schools, making use of the best of each of the schools for the mutual enrichment. 3º.- To involve the families and other members of the community in the processes of Inclusion. 4º.- To help develop in the younger students an open mind to the pluriculturality. 5º.- To establish stable working lines, so that they become “school style”. In the first 2 mobilities the teachers already observed those aspects that would serve as inspiration to improve the dinamics in both schools. In the C1 (first mobility of spanish teachers to Belgium) the teachers observed how in Zwaluwnest they were using the space with a more educational purpose. Not only the classrooms but also the common areas of the halls and the playgrounds. They also observed that there were numerous occasions for the learning of the children to be more spontaneous, through discovery and research, and not so directive. In the C3 (first mobility of the belgian teachers to Spain), the teachers observed that in Arcipreste de Hita they had organized a systematic participation of the families and other members of the Educative Community. This was not only a source of motivation for both the families and the students, but they also regarded it as the new and enriching perspective in education. They also saw some activities and strategies that were focused in giving an appropriate response to diversity, without the children feeling pointed at, as well as techniques to work on Emotional and Social intelligence (hence, Inclusion). The Management Meetings (M1-M5) were essential for the following: - Gather and analyze what was observed by the teachers in the mobilities. - Coordinate and assess the planned actions in both schools, as a natural consequence of the observations. - To organize the next mobility of the teachers. We have to highlight the M3 (July, 2017) when we created a project that greatly exceeded our initial goals with “Learn together to live together”: we use the character of a Belgian inclusive story (Rikki) to dinamize a common activity with the children. Rikki is a different rabbit, because he has a flipped down ear. Despite the hard beginning, the bunny learns to deal with his difference in order to be happy and include in his group. In the management meeting we “created” a twin brother (Rikko) who would leave to Spain because “he couldn’t cope with the difference”. Through the two bunnies, the children from both countries, throughout 2017-2018: 1º.- Worked the empathy and the natural acceptance of difference. All the children greated a very strong emotional link with the two rabbits and showed clear inclination to help them. They took the rabbit to their homes in Spain (using a “travelling notebook”) and in Belgium he became the classmate with whom all wanted to be. 2º.- Linked the two schools. We had some video conferences, so that both brothers could meet. The children learnt to communicate and appreciate the others on the other side of the screen, even if they talked differently and didn’t know them personally. 3º.- Learnt many things about each other. We used the two bunnies to work with the childres on cultural and linguistic aspects characteristics from each country. The Belgian children even learnt many words and a song in Spanish. This way, we worked on plurilinguism and pluriculturality. This Project bécame the “star” of “Learn together to live together”. But we got other goals, that will be developed in the report, but could be summarized in these points: 1º.- In El Espinar, inspired by the visits to Zwaluwnest we got a better use of the space, both in the classrooms and in commons areas of the school and the playground. 2º.- In Wachtebecke, inspired by the visits to Arcipreste de Hita, they got a higher participation of the families in the school, as well as the beginning of activities that are meant to improve Attention to Diversity and Inclusion. The Project has lasted 26 months, with a very clear goal: during the first school year we started the observation and assessment of improvements and we had the first steps towards the changes (always slow). During the second school year we worked on fully implementation and dissemination of the changes as well as on the assessment of results. And, in the third school year, we incorporated the changes in the regulations of the school, so that they became something stable and lasting.