The project "LEAD- Learning, experiencing and awareness of the diversity" emerges in the contemporary socio-political situation across the globe. Every day we witness violence, intolerance, hatred and conflicts between people and they are becoming the background in which the young generations are growing up. Great migrant crisis that struck the world has affected all European countries. Being aware that we can't change the situation, we decide to change the environment. The project " LEAD" aims to convey a positive image of people with various backgrounds, empowering them to see the diversity as an asset, and migrant's crisis as an opportunity. We believe that education has a key role in supporting the integration, preventing discrimination and promoting tolerance and respect. The project "LEAD" aims at using various learning methods that will be experienced creating skills to deal with xenophobia and prejudices against the different. It's of great importance today to pay attention to our students' social inclusion because of the contemporary situation with the refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. The contact with other cultures opens eyes, minds and hearts. The project aims at broadening the students' horizons and providing a future perspective through cooperation, and thus facilitating labour market integration. The EU citizenship and the fundamental values of the EU: respect for diversity, intercultural dialogue, tolerance and social inclusion are the basic objectives of our project. We consider one of the aims of this project the active citizenship through peer leadership. The participants will be teachers and students from four schools in Poland, Spain, Italy and Bulgaria. The project will include a large number of students,15-19 years old, of each school that come from various backgrounds. The teachers will be chosen from those who are open-minded and aware of the needed changes in their students. They are going to invest in inter-cultural and social skills of their students that they need to cope with the diversity. The teachers will be responsible to involve students in various activities boosting their key competencies to deal with their prejudices. During the project, we expect to improve the awareness of the diversity and the 21st century competencies of all participants taking part in the project, and thus reducing disparities. The activities will focus on creating "hard" skills like digital and foreign language competences; photographic abilities; knowledge of the diversity and healthy living, and use them as a means enhancing "soft" skills like self-esteem, responsibility, active citizenship, problem-solving, creativity, initiative etc. through diversity issues. The project will focus on how to organize web education in a proper useful and creative way. This will be realized by the application and exchange of good teaching practices. We need to urgently invest in developing emerging school leaders and guidance from those who are showing the way. Many young students get addicted to the usage of ICT and they don't realize that it reflects badly on their health. We consider it a good approach if we increase our students' awareness of healthy living by a lot of activities due to nature, food styles, sports etc. We are looking for the balance between the virtual life and the healthy life of the participants. We also see this project as an alternative objective to engage students in extra-curriculum activities that would keep them away from other negative influence. Teachers will apply different approaches to engage individuals and groups during formal and in-formal education such as: The World cafe; The Factory of learning; The Six hats; Diversity in the snapshot; International Fairy tales; Forum Theatre method etc. Another activity is the Picture-based dictionary, which will improve language skills by explaining terms of the diversity. We strongly hope to multiply the effects of the project by a demonstration debate in the format World School debates and a workshop "20 ways to slice Europe". Creating thematic blogs in the Internet, elaborating newsletters, performing contests and other tasks concerning migrants, cultural differences, etc. will remain in our website to inform and guide the future Erasmus+projects. The long-term impact on the participants will be the greater understanding and responsiveness to social, ethnic and cultural diversity and tolerance and thus reducing disparities. Establishing links with stakeholders such as businessmen, town councils, NGOs etc. means bridging the gap between the school and the real world. Such stakeholder engagement can help tackle the challenges in school through forging links with parents, as well as businesses and other organizations that may help improve the relevance of learning. We hope that through dissemination of our project's results we will be able to increase youth employability, empowerment, social and inter cultural skills as well.
The project "LEAD- Learning, Experiencing, and Awareness of the Diversity" emerged in the contemporary socio-political situation across the globe. The great migrants' crisis that struck the world has affected all European countries. Being aware that we weren't able to change the situation, we decided to change the environment. The project " LEAD" aimed at conveying a positive image of people with various backgrounds. It empowered them to see the diversity as an asset, and migrants' crisis as an opportunity. Contact with other cultures opened eyes, minds, and hearts. The project aimed at broadening the students' horizons and providing a future perspective through cooperation, and thus facilitating labor market integration. EU citizenship and the fundamental values of the EU: respect for diversity, intercultural dialogue, tolerance, and social inclusion are the fundamental objectives of our project. We considered one of the aims of this project the active citizenship through peer leadership. The participants were teachers and students from four schools in Poland, Spain, Italy, and Bulgaria. Two of the schools were general educational, and two were vocational. The project included a large number of students,15-19 years old, of each school that comes from various backgrounds. Two of the schools were general educational, and two were vocational. We believed that schools had a key role in supporting integration, preventing discrimination, and promoting tolerance and respect. The teachers were chosen from those who were open-minded and aware of the needed changes in their students. They invested in the inter-cultural and social skills of their students that they needed to cope with diversity. The teachers were responsible for involving students in various activities, boosting their key competencies to deal with their prejudices. The project LEAD aimed at using various learning methods. These were experienced creating skills to deal with xenophobia and prejudices against the different. It's of great importance today to pay attention to our students' social inclusion because of the contemporary situation with the refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants. Tolerance and social inclusion were the basic objectives of our project. We hope that during the project, we improved the awareness of diversity and the 21st-century competencies of all participants - taking part in the project, and thus reducing disparities. The activities used to be diverse and focused on creating "hard" skills like digital and foreign language competences; photographic abilities; knowledge of the diversity and healthy living, and use them as a means enhancing "soft" skills like self-esteem, responsibility, active citizenship, problem-solving, creativity, initiative etc. through diversity issues. The project focused on how to organize web education in a proper useful and creative way. This activity had been realized by the application and exchange of good teaching practices among the partnering schools. We considered it a good approach if we had increased our students' awareness of healthy living. We did this by a lot of activities due to nature, food styles, sports, etc. We also saw this project as an alternative objective to engage students in extra-curriculum activities that would keep them away from certain negative influences. This activity also had lead to the reducing of disparities. Teachers had applied many strategies by using different approaches and resources. They engaged and included individuals and groups during formal and informal education: such as Motivational approach; Involving classmates (cooperative learning, peer- tutoring); flipped classroom method; the method of lateral thinking called the "Six hats"; the "Factory of learning"; project-based learning approach; teaching through workshops based on problem solving, learning ability to cope with possible difficulties; forum - theatre method; world café approach; the story-telling approach. There were shown many lessons throughout the visits and in between. We used the " Atlas of prejudices " and especially "Tearing Europe apart " to make students realize what were the prejudices for the European peoples and how the students assessed them. Throughout the project, students carried out research work. The project teams searched and published interesting information like publications, Internet sites which they used in their learning practices. Throughout the project, there had been experienced teamwork by the Internet to create a Picture Dictionary. It included terms related to the objectives of the project. In all the exchanges were organized cultural evenings that aimed to present the traditions of the visited countries. Thus the participants understood the features in common and the diversity of every nation. We considered an innovative approach to celebrating the holidays. They were linked with the project's objectives at all the partnering schools like for example, the