'Tell us About Yourself. Exploring and Celebrating Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Schools and Local Communities Across Europe' is a project embedded in the context of an increasingly globalized world. In many of our students we see a trend to conform to a dominant, global lifestyle in order to benefit from the educational opportunities and technological advances, while denying their unique backgrounds, cultural heritage, personal stories and family histories. This applies especially to the large group of students at each of our schools who have a migrational background to a lesser or greater degree. At the same time, we are convinced that making these very personal stories of migration known to a larger public will make it easier for them, especially the young refugees who have come to our countries in recent years to find a home at our schools and in our local communities, as they will realize how diverse European culture already is. It will be a valuable experience for them to save this treasure of personal stories and memories when other treasures like fotos and mementoes are lost. This project will show our students how many people across Europe have similar stories to their own ones. The main objective we pursue is to make not only them but every student at our schools aware of this wealth of life stories, stories told in families over generations, specific knowledge handed down from grandparents to their children and grandchildren, by making them tell, record and share them with other European students through digital storytelling. Another important concern of the project will be the recording of oral histories, i.e. students will meet up with and interview contemporary witnesses, people who participated in or observed relevant past events related to issues of migration and cultural diversity. In addition, students will learn in workshops and teach their European partners what is worth knowing about migration and cultural diversity in their local communities. They will research and survey their local communities through the lense of cultural diversity, raising questions like 'What facilities are there to make migrants coming to the city feel welcome and at home?' 'What are the strategies implemented, what are the experiences made by local institutions, clubs etc. in this respect?' 'What are the chances and challenges?' 'What is needed to improve the situation if necessary?' On the whole, we see this project as an opportunity to make our schools more inclusive and open-minded. We hope that our activities will also inspire our local communities and external partners through our innovative approach to dealing with migration and cultural diversity, which is one of empowerment and inclusion - not of impairment and exclusion.
Resulting from a perceivable trend towards conformity among our students, we began our ERASMUS+ KA2 project "Tell Us About Yourself. Exploring and Celebrating Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Schools and Local Communities Across Europe". The title of the project "Tell Us About Yourself" was intended to be open so as to avoid quick and short answers. Instead we wanted our student to embark on a journey into themselves. Throughout the project the participating thirty sixth-form students and seven teachers of 1 EPAL Gera/Lesvos (Greece), IMS Private School Limassol (Cyprus) and Phoenix Gymnasium Wolfsburg-Vorsfelde (Germany) were seizing ample opportunity to learn about themselves by answering questions like "Who am I?" "Where are my roots?" "Where am I going?" - questions vital for every human being. Answering them for yourself in the context of your own community of peers can be an interesting and inspiring endeavour. Yet by making the students deal with these questions with peers from two European countries, they became part of a setting for a cultural dialogue which made it possible for those involved to obtain unexpected results and a more profound level of understanding of their own identity. This was the first level of our project: the topic of "Cultural Diversity." After some negotiating, the group defined it as "what makes each of us unique", "the individual, exclusive story someone can tell." The outcome where refugee stories, stories of migration, stories of belonging to two European national identities caused by the multitude of migration movements within Europe in the decades following the Second World War. Another kind of stories emerging form this dialogue where the stories of the enchantment and the difficulties of adolescents forming their identity, which can also mean that they would have to cope with bullying. On a second, methodological level, students became familiar with the "Oral History Interview". They learned how to prepare themselves for the interview and recorded a few together with their teachers. In doing so, they realized that their own personal story has historiographic value. On a third level the two previously mentioned aspects were combined in a digital story our students had to prepare about themselves. They used user-friendly digital tools such as Moviemaker and WeVideo for that purpose. The stories evolving from that process are available in the ERASMUS+ Project Results Platform. These were the three levels that structured out work on the project. We considered the three short term exchanges of our students in Limassol (February 2018), Wolfsburg (November 2018) and Gera/ Lesvos (June 2019) to be milestones that gave them opportunities for the continuing cultural dialogue, ideas and input about the topic and the methods used so as to be able to continue working successfully in between the short exchanges of students.