Religious and cultural diversity are today more than ever a critical and political challenge as the recent emergencies related to geo-political and economical global transformations show. Stereotypes and prejudices about religions and in religions can jeopardize an already fragile social fabric and lead to discrimination, ghettoization and radicalization. Responses to these challenges can be represented especially by considering the fundamental role of school teachers about religious and cultural difference and diversity in building societies and social cohesion.Therefore the SORAPS Project aim to create the following Intellectual Outputs, completely open, scalable, and transferable to any other institution or schools, thus ensure sustainability.1) Guidelines on contrasting prejudices and stereotypes in religions2) Curriculum, teaching materials and guidelines for a online/ in presence blended teacher training course on Religions and Interculturality,specifically aimed to tackle prejudices and stereotypes in religions thanks to the aforementioned guidelines.3) Online Training Platform in which the online part of the above mentioned course will take place. This Platform will be able to be used with tutors or stand-alone, for self-teaching of individuals.These three Intellectual Outputs will be tested by teachers coming from school directly involved in the consortium, in order to ensure smooth mutual cooperation and support between academic/research institutions and schools. Teachers from these three high schools will undergo 2 Mobilty Training Events and 1 extensive Online Training Phase using the above mentioned Online Training Platform.Moreover, since the teachers will be formed also to be trainers of other teachers, the partner schools, will implement a Multiplication Training Phase, lead by the till-now trainer teachers, to ensure multiplication of impact. The aims is to strengthen their professional profile of teachers by achieving the appropriate preparation in topics related to history of religions, contemporary religious pluralism, intercultural issues management and Digital Literacy so that they can have a effective impact on their students, fostering social and intercultural skill, value for respect and democracy.The consortium brings together expertise in religions and methods of teaching religions, formal and informal training of teachers in intercultural issues and ICT methodology for schools, along, of course, with three schools interested with previous experiences in similar issues.These institutions are:Università Ca’Foscari Venezia (Italy)Ecole pratique des hautes études, (France)Universidad de Salamanca (Spain)Universität Augsburg (Germany)Syddansk Universitet (Denmark)OXFAM Italia Intercultura (Italy)Liceo Cafoscarini (Italy)IES Campo Charro (Spain)Lycée René Cassin (France)
Religious and cultural diversity today more than ever constitutes a critical challenge. European countries are concerned about consequences of immigration, especially due to immigrants from Muslim countries, and about terrorist attacks linked one way or the other to religion. Stereotypes, prejudices and fear flourish. The project "Study of Religions Against Prejudices & Stereotypes" aims at contributing in significant ways to long-term educational efforts to meet the challenges and hopefully to contribute to mutual understanding and integration, as well as to counter conflicts and radicalization based upon prejudice rather than knowledge. SORAPS aims to strengthen the professional profile of teachers by developing their social, civic and intercultural competences, fostering their knowledge and critical thinking on contemporary religious pluralism, intercultural issues management and Digital Literacy. SORAPS aims at doing so by creating three Intellectual Outputs. The first Intellectual Output "Guidelines on prejudices and stereotypes in Religions" is agile yet accurate publication about the principal prejudices and stereotypes in the field of religious phenomena. The second Intellectual Output "Teacher training course design" capitalizes the findings of the above-mentioned Guidelines. It consists of a course curriculum together with correlated training materials. This course is conceived to be carried out in blended modality, i.e. both face-to-face and online training. The third Intellectual Output (IO3) is the virtual space dedicated to the training in which the various materials are organized in a coherent manner. It has been developed to be used in the free and open-source Moodle environment, but an open access, website version has also been developed. SORAPS Project Consortium brings together different partners with complementary expertise in order to create these Outputs. -Università Ca' Foscari Venezia: (UNIVE, Coordinator) is well experienced in international projects management.Through the Department of Asian and North African Studies it contributes also with experts in the field of Religions and Inter-cultural Studies. - The Ecole Pratique Des Hautes Etudes, with its European Institute of Religious Sciences (IESR), has an extensive experience in religious studies and training of teachers in these topics. - The Universidad de Salamanca (USAL) is involved via its Research group in Interaction and eLearning (Grial) in order to provide the ICT expertise to create digital outputs. - The staff from the Universitaet Augsburg (UAU) are researchers in didactics of history in the perspective of intercultural dialogue. - Syddansk Universitet (SDU) with its The Study of Religions Research Unit provides distinguished scholars in Methodology of Studies of Religions and in the Study of religion-based Religious Education. - Oxfam Italia (OIT) contributes with its experience in project concerning migrants, intercultural integration, and formal and in-formal teachers training. - Moreover, three schools Convitto Foscarini (FOSC) Lycée René Cassin (RECA) and IES Campo Charro (ICC) have been directly involved in the partnership as hubs for the piloting SORAPS Teacher Training Course. An innovative character of this project can be found in the fact that the Teachers Training Course aims also to equip trainees with the necessary skill to address other colleagues and inform and train them in the SORAPS topics. In fact, the 9 piloting teachers, who underwent a 7 month-long training period, organized the so-called Multiplier Training Events in which they trained 67 colleagues. In conclusion, the three SORAPS Intellectual Outputs. which received good evaluation from the piloting teachers, are sustainable and open access tools that can be used by the single user as well by larger training institution. Being usable in both blended (face-to-face and online) and online-only modality, this scalability surely will help its exploitation by a number of stakeholders, who have been already informed by extensive dissemination activities (3,942 persons reached by Newsletter, 1,850 website users, around 2,600 persons reached through face-to-face events).