SUMMARY OF THE PROJECT The project is presented as an exercise to raise awareness among students of the need to study and reflect on an important issue that concerns all Europeans, refugees. Today we find a lot of immigrants who are packed on one of the entrance gates to Europe, a gate which is now closed. The study aims to strengthen the European dimension in the field of secondary education. Student mobility is an opportunity for students to have a more tolerant and receptive attitude towards different viewpoints and cultures. And this will help them to find a job within and outside our borders in the future. All innovative ideas, good teaching practices, new methodologies and teaching materials will be promoted and spread. The interaction with the other students will provide opportunities for them to acquire the spirit of respecting a new language and their own language and consequently the cultural diversity that enriches them. To learn the foreign language we will use an innovative approach: Cooperative Learning, Learning by doing and Peer to peer. Through cooperation activities, students will improve their own skills, their commitment to team work, their social relationships and their planning skills. They will also use information and communication technology. In the two years of the project, job shadowing will be performed when teachers accompany the students and we will have a teacher available for CLIL classes in the host country by both parties. The linguistic peculiarities of the two regions will be taken into account, on the one hand in the Community of Valencia with Catalan (Valencia variation), and on the other with the Sicilian dialect of Italian spoken in the region of Sicily. We also intend to carry out the following projects: a) a compendium of flash fiction, open to all the students of the high school, where the topic proposed will be addressed and we will hold a contest to choose the best; b) a concert of traditional music where the different influences from all the Mediterranean peoples will be reflected; c) we will discuss all the positive aspects of the contacts with other Mediterranean communities and their cultures (art, gastronomy, religion, lifestyles…); d) with help from NGOs, we will work to strengthen solidarity with others and we will paint murals that will deal with topics such as the role of women in society, the living conditions in the refugee camps, etc; e) we will organize a photographic exhibition on historical memory; f) finally we will close the project with a colloquium on films set in the Mediterranean that address the issue of refugees. A digital book will collect all the phases of the project and it will be accessible throughout the different internet platforms that we will be using.
At the time the project was raised to colleague teachers and the management of our school, the biggest topic at that time was that of migration and refugees. We have seen how these people were standing at the gates of Europe, which closed them and set them aside, without any chance to set in. Anyway, we have to say that the situation has changed very little. With the study and approach to students of this misfortune we wanted to reinforce the European dimension in the secondary education sector. The students who have worked on this project during the two years have become more open and receptive to other cultures and more respectful towards the immigrant students of our secondary school. In addition, the students who have taken part in the Long-Term Mobility, after working on the issues presented in the project and after living abroad, have understood what it is to be a migrant and have become more European, have learned a new language, have studied new subjects in addition to theirs, and have also integrated into a program similar to that taught in Spain. They have also worked on ICTs. For all these reasons, we think that their future work opportunities in our country, and abroad, will be easier for them. All this has made them compare the new culture to theirs, with its positive and negative issues and, as a consequence, they have learnt to value what they do in our school, how they study and the means they use, and have learnt to assess it in a positive way. In short, they have noticed how cultural diversity enriches them. The students have improved their own skills and those of group work and cooperation with their peers. During the two years of the project they have attended talks, conferences and exhibitions. Together with their partners they have made some way out to participate in our culture, often hardly known. During the execution of our project a jobshadowing experience has been carried out by accompanying teachers. We have worked in the configuration of the schedules, we have been with our partner teachers, we have observed the methodology they use and later on we have presented it to the rest of the school community. A teacher has also travelled to the neighboring country, where he has conducted classes through CLIL methodology. The variety of Catalan spoken in our community has also been taken into account. During the CLIL teacher's presentation, he has introduced words in Valencian and a comparison has been made with the Italian and many times with the Sicilian, since Sicily was part of the Crown of Aragon . They have exported our culture, our language and finally have made their partners understand it better. The same has been done by our partners in our school. Contests have been held for students from both countries, a) realization-contest of the Project Logo, which has accompanied us during the two years of his life. b) micro- story contest in which an expert explained how it was done, the students wrote their own short story and a contest was held; c) a traditional music concert was also held where the influences of the Mediterranean peoples were reflected; they saw how instruments were made with waste materials. d) they have addressed the positive contact between the two communities by means of different cultural influences (art, gastronomy religion, lifestyles ...) that have been produced in the Mediterranean area throughout history. Solidarity, migration, refugees, the situation of women in refugee camps have been worked together with NGOs, which has helped to better understand project issues. In the end, an exhibition was held on everything that had been worked on during the two years, for which our machinery vocational school colleagues and their students manufactured a large tent. The murals made by the students were exhibited together with an exhibition of photographs provided by the Red Cross together with material from a refugee camp. Finally we collected a survey from politicians and personalities, as well as members of the school staff, who responded to the question about what they thought on migration and refugees. In conclusion, we should thank Erasmus + for carrying out projects of this nature, as they help to understand Europe better for teachers, students and families. They helped us have a richer vision of our differences, they also helped the students with worse economic backgrounds, and thus they have made our schools change for the better. After living an Erasmus+ experience like this in our school, it is no longer the same.