The presented project ‚My involvement as a European with refugee children’ brings together four schools from Germany, Greece, Croatia and France with the intent of tackling the currently pressing situation of refugee families entering Europe in search for safety and a better life. The related challenge of fully including refugee children into society requires to prepare European students for this change within their school environment. In order to create an open and welcoming school culture that defines inclusion as implicit, the project aims at fostering and enhancing the intercultural competence of students across all grades. Therefore, we plan on conducting four intercultural workshop sessions with the support of an external intercultural trainer over the course of two years. Thereby, the four schools will take turns in hosting the transnational student teams. After successfully completing one session, the participating students will then take the role of intercultural ambassadors at their respective schools by transmitting their newly acquired knowledge and skills to their schoolmates. In addition, the material that has been collected during the workshop sessions will be made available to all teachers in order to be included into their educational work. In order to further enhance the reflection between the workshop sessions about what is their own and the other culture, students independently work on raising awareness about refugee children by initiating diverse activities, researching the situation of refugee children in their respective societies, and reflecting upon social and political discourses. Thereby, students are given space to come up with their own ideas. Initial ideas include storytelling, photo collages, simulations, role games, theater plays, song collections, etc. Yet, all activities are intended to work towards the objective of establishing an open, inclusive and welcoming school culture that encourages students, teachers and parents to take a cosmopolitan and value-based attitude and to collectively and appropriately manage the changing school environment. An e-Twinning platform will be used by all partner schools to present, discuss and evaluate conducted activities, which also gives impulses and inspiration for further activities. Moreover, different situations of refugee children in the four countries will be discussed in order to deduce conclusions defining collective awareness and action in line with European values. By strengthening the students’ intercultural competence, they will be enabled to take value-based decisions and find appropriate solutions beyond cultural differences. Finally, we expect the project to have a positive impact on the students’ families, friends and hence, their society through a knock-on effect of this positive behavior.
The project "My involvement as a European with refugee children" was jointly contested by four schools from Germany, Greece, Croatia and France. In all four countries schools face the challenge of integrating children from refugee families entering Europe into school life and the local community in search of safety and a better life. In order to create an open and welcoming school culture that defines inclusion as implicit the project aimed to foster and enhance the intercultural competence of students across all grades. Therefore, we conducted four coordinated intercultural training modules with the support of external intercultural trainers over a period of two years. At the end of each training module the participants planned a workshop to pass on the contents of the respective module as intercultural ambassadors to their classmates at the home schools. In the phases between the project meetings the students prepared the workshops and implemented them in several classes of different grade levels supported by their professional teachers. In addition to this, various activities were initiated at each school which further deepened the reflection on one's own and the other culture and sharpened the pupils' awareness of the situation of the refugee children in their respective societies. A separate eTwinning TwinSpace has been set up to support i.a. to present, discuss and evaluate the experiences of the students during the intercultural training and workshops. Another focus was to announce project activities and content across various public channels, such as local and school media. Along with the project meetings during which the foreign guest students were accommodated in host families resulted a positive and broad impact on family members, friends and thus on the local society. The spread of positive thinking and behavior has led to the promising effect of bringing collective awareness and action in line with European values, growing skepticism towards simple and rapid solutions and encouraging a greater number of members of the community to become cosmopolitan and to adopt a value-based attitude and thus create an open, inclusive and welcoming school culture at the institutions involved. In addition to the students from migrant families, this also benefits guest students and pupils with special needs. In order to reflect the positive impact of the project activities on school communities in future student generations, the material collected during intercultural trainings and workshops was made available to all teachers to support their future pedagogical work.