School has an important role in reflecting to the changes in the surrounding world. It should promote participation and democracy, equity and equality. There has been a lot of turbulence in Europe recently. There is an urgent need to strengthen our students’ knowledge, skills and competencies to grow up as active citizens who value non-discrimination and equality, non-violence and peace. Such values cannot be taken for granted any more. The participants of this project have different backgrounds and they come from different parts of Europe. They all have challenges in defining their identity. As educators we want them to learn to appreciate and respect diversity in society which is an important part of global competence. In our team of schools from Finland, the UK and Spain we decided that it’s important to help the students to become aware of the things that affect their decision making and develop their thinking skills so that they can make measured choices that are not borne out of stereotypes, tradition or instinct. In our project we will be doing this by using activities where the students use cognitive strategies whereby they become aware of their thinking process. This will encourage them to think critically of the binary world of social media where people just simply click ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ with very little consideration of ‘why’ or ‘how’ they have reached that decision. In our activities we will be using a variety of games, role play and storytelling. To train the students’ ICT skills and to motivate them we will be making use of gamification software by choosing tools such as Apps and a new innovative SOLOMO tool called Action Track. The students and teachers will be learning to use this tool together and sharing their knowledge with their peers. We will be taking steps in the use of the tool by starting with simple tracks where students learn about each other’s countries and neighbourhood, cultures and traditions thus enhancing their knowledge. The next step is to incorporate more complex contents with pictures, sound and video into Action Track activities. The aim of these activities is to challenge the player to think about how they form their opinions about other people and how external markers are only part of who we are. Moreover, Action Track allows us to take learning out of traditional classrooms and use tracks as both mental and physical activities. The tracks can be anywhere: outdoors in the forest, in the school yard or in the school building. We will produce an Action Track user manual to help and encourage other schools to design and use the tool in a varied way. We will make the Action Tracks with descriptions of the aim and contents of the activities available to all. We will evaluate the tool and give feedback on it to the company TAZ who has developed the tool and owns the licence. Moreover, we will make a collection of the conflictive cognitive activities we have used and present it as an ebook. We believe that it is important for the schools to take action in promoting a better understanding of diversity and developing the students’ ability to live in harmony with different kinds of people. To promote democracy we need to promote the positive change in the way our students think. That change starts on a personal level, spreads on a local level in schools and we hope that it ultimately brings along a positive change on a wider international level so that we get a lot of ‘likes’ for non-discrimination and equality, non-violence and peace.
We set out on this journey with a steadfast belief that school has an important role in reflecting the changes in the surrounding world. We felt strongly that school should promote participation and democracy, equity and equality. Over the past few years there has been a lot of turbulence in Europe. Displacement of Global citizens as well as internal conflicts within some European countries has impacted on the traditional Europe that we have come to know. These changes have created a level of partisan ideology that we have not seen for a generation. As experienced educators we felt that there was an urgent need to strengthen our students’ knowledge, skills and competencies in order for them to grow up as active citizens who value non-discrimination and equality, non-violence and peace. In addition, we wanted our young people to move away from the newly created binary world where in an instant they select ‘Like or Dislike’ without both having a secure knowledge base for this decision and time in which to process their thinking. We sadly felt that such values could not be taken as the default setting in current times. The participants of this project had different backgrounds and they come from different parts of Europe and in some cases, their parents came from different parts of the world. They all had challenges in defining their identity and indeed defining what identity meant to them. As educators we wanted them to learn to appreciate and respect diversity in society which is an important part of global competence. In our team of schools from Finland, the UK and Spain we decided that it’s important to help the students to become aware of the things that affect their decision making and develop their thinking skills so that they can make measured choices that are not borne out of stereotypes, tradition or instinct. The project in total involved over 70 youngsters and over 20 adults that travelled to other locations as well as another 100 or so teachers and students who were involved as in-school hosts. As important to acknowledge is the huge impact that the hosting families had in their multiple roles of surrogate parents, mentors, teachers, counsellors and kind friends. In our project we developed activities where students used cognitive strategies in order to become more aware of their thinking process. The aim of these activities was to challenge the students to think about how they form their opinions about other people, and how external markers are only part of who we are. Evidence from pre and post visit evaluations shows that this encouraged them to think more critically of the binary world of social media where people just simply click ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ with little consideration of ‘why’ or ‘how’ they have reached that decision. In our activities we used a variety of games, role play and storytelling. The games and presentations were created by our students. To develop the students’ ICT skills and to motivate them we made use of gamification software by choosing tools such as Apps and a new innovative SOLOMO tool called Action Track. The students and teachers learnt to use this tool together, and shared their knowledge with their peers. We developed the use of the tool by starting with simple tracks where students learn about each other’s countries and neighbourhood, cultures and traditions thus enhancing their knowledge. For the second and third visits we incorporated more complex contents with pictures, sound and video into Action Tracks. The aim of these activities was to learn cooperation and teamwork in mixed country teams. Moreover, Action Track allowed us to take learning out of traditional classrooms and use tracks as both mental and physical activities. The tracks can be anywhere: outdoors in the forest, in the school yard or in the school building. We produced a beginner’s Action Track user guide to help and encourage other schools to design tracks for learning. In the role of users both the adults and young people enjoyed playing the tracks. The envisaged development of skill as game designers that we thought would occur through the project did not fully materialise. More time would be needed for reaching an expert level. Our project outcomes are presented on our website www.LikeDislike.info. We collated the cognitive conflictive activities that we created and used, and presented them as a downloadable eBook on the website We believe that it is important for schools to take action in promoting a better understanding of diversity and developing the students’ ability to live in harmony with different kinds of people. To promote democracy we need to promote the positive change in the way our students think. That change starts on a personal level, spreads on a local level in schools and we hope that it ultimately brings along a positive change on a wider international level so that we get a lot of ‘likes’ for non-discrimination and equality, non-violence and peace.