Our project is called ‘FOTO- Fight For Tolerance’ – in schools, communities and whole regions. Learning the many aspects of prejudice is the central idea, which will guide our students to a more open attitude towards their fellow human beings. With this topic we would like to address certain questions: cultures and their attitude towards prejudices, students’involvement in active promotion of better behaviours, encouragement of students’participation in new initiatives. The motivation for this proposal is the need to -enhance students’ interest in social issues and youth work -teach students being promoters of positive attitude and behaviour towards other people -exchange and accept examples of good practices from each partner -promote and use the power of innovation to solve social challenges -establish our schools as active subjects in modern education -educate students who will be active citizens and more involved in the social context -teach students new skills and improve their competences. Our priorities are: Promoting the acquisition of skills and competences in schools, supporting schools to tackle early school leaving and disadvantage so that they develop their skills and competences by active participation. Promoting youth work, making students active citizens. The purpose of this partnership is to raise awareness towards a crucial social problem, prejudice and reduce negative feelings towards our human mates, tolerance. The participants will include whole secondary schools and local communities. Moreover, we plan to bring together students who achieve above average results with those who do not do too well at school as a way to give them support and role models. Methodology: The members of the five partner schools will present their unique situation in terms of problems arising from prejudice and with cooperative joint activities they will come up with ideas as how to defeat these negative attitudes to become more tolerant. All participating schools have chosen two aspects that are most typical in their region to coordinate the common work on these topics. Coming from very different heritages it was obvious to focus on cultural and social aspects that unite or differ us. We are going to use high technology tools like Google+, Google drive applications – file sharing, blogging, cloud storage; exploring online quizzes, gap fill tools and dynamic materials; Digital storytelling; slideshows, animations and cartoons. The first step is drawing students’ attention to the problem to make them aware of its causes and types and then through research, discussions and different activities try to find some solutions and tactics to eliminate this negative attitude. As for the implementation, students will meet every week to work on the themes at each institution first separately, then will exchange information through various on-line tools with the partners. They will also have a film club – before exchange meetings they are watching a film on the actual topic, discuss it and do post watching tasks together at the project meetings. Thus they can see the others’ point of view and have a deeper understanding of the issue. The actual exchanges will be essential in the multilingual communication of the partners, the mutual understanding of students from different nations. The whole project is planned so that it gives excellent examples for the interdisciplinary, i.e. the fact that the different subjects are not independent. We will enrich our schools’ curricula in subjects like English, History, Geography, Art, IT. Most importantly the project will produce digital materials to tackle particular issues of tolerance. Students will compare different situations, conditions and try to find solutions to overcome difficulties. They will combine work, fun and knowledge in an effort to realize their common European identity. During the two years they will have the opportunity to improve almost all the competencies. Teachers will have the chance to meet foreign colleagues, cooperate with them, exchange new practices and learn new methods. By participating in the project students and teachers alike will find possibilities to be more active citizens. They will find common values and appreciate European democracy while getting closer to their own heritage as well. To sum up, this project will certainly awaken and foster a sense of awareness for tolerance in different connections and will help make individuals and communities overcome their negative attitudes. To make the results available for a large audience we are going to choose a wide variety of tools to disseminate the findings and outputs of the project ensuring long-term results and impacts. We are going to invite members of local authorities and also MEPs to some project programmes like the Multinational Cultural Performances. All the five students exchanges will deal with different aspects of the main topic and will contribute to the final conclusion.
The motivation for this project Fight For Tolerance came from earlier international projects. All five participating schools had previous experience, carrying out projects on different themes like gender equality, women’s role in society, human rights, intercultural relations. The idea of prejudice was and is relevant everywhere. Coming from different cultural backgrounds, it is impossible to avoid having prejudices. The desire to explore the topic more thoroughly was born and complemented by the desire to find solutions to it. The international situation in Europe, which raises a lot of controversial issues about race, religion, migration just strengthened this need to raise awareness towards a crucial social problem, prejudice and find out how people can overcome these negative attitudes and adapt tolerance. Giving youngsters the chance to actually meet persons who are prejudiced, to experience this issue from different perspectives and hear their peers’ point of view as well, they can reduce negative feelings towards other human beings. We wanted to make students aware of the different aspects of prejudice from gender, nation, social background, religion, age, education to politics and race, what problems can arise from it and let them find possible solutions on how people can become unprejudiced. By doing this project we aimed to enhance students’ interest in social issues and youth work; teach them to be promoters of positive attitude and behaviour towards other people; also teach them new skills and improve their competences; make them more involved in the social context, become more active citizens of Europe and accept examples of good practices from other partners. We also wanted to support students with fewer opportunities as they are very often at disadvantage and prejudiced. Our priorities were to promote the acquisition of skills and competences in schools; to support schools to tackle early school leaving and disadvantage and to promote quality youth work. Five secondary schools formed the partnership, they are very different in size and profile,and this diversity benefited the project as the participants could experience different educational backgrounds. From each school about 30 students aged 16-18 could travel and take part in the 5 short-term students’ exchanges, but in their home schools more students were involved in the project activities. We addressed local institutions, culture and sport centres and local NGOs as well. They helped us in workshops and provided opportunities for the students to do youth work. As for the activities and methodology, we tried to offer the students a variety of tasks to engage in non-formal project work. At each exchange, we focused on two aspects of prejudice, for which they prepared presentations after doing research work. To each topic we chose a film that dealt with that particular issue and rose interest in students. They watched them between the mobilities and then did tasks and discussions about them. During the mobilities we always devoted one workshop to deal with the message of the film. Students also did surveys in their surroundings about people’s attitude to prejudice and analysed them. During the two years we followed the happenings in Europe concerning the migrants’ situation as our topic intertwines so much with it. They presented the conditions in their home country and learned about the problems of other countries. By doing this, they got a deeper insight into the nature of this topic and appreciated their own situation much more. The international context made it possible to learn from each other and experience situations that are unique for a place. Final results: web site, promotional videos, logo, presentations, quizzes, multicultural performances, mini dictionary, project magazines, articles, digital educational materials. Participants were exposed to different learning environment and they developed new knowledge and competency as regards the topic of tolerance. Students acquired new skills and competences:practiced project work, cooperation, team work in English, increased their intercultural understanding through intercultural dialogue; developed their digital skills; learnt to appreciate each other more; became more involved in voluntary work and youth work; become more interested in social studies; got to know the European Union better. Teachers increased their motivation, used new skills in project management and ICT, appraised the European idea and cooperation. Participating institutions created better relationships among the school staff, learnt a lot about different educational systems and practices in other countries, increased the prestige of their school, enhanced the quality of teaching English, Science, Art and ICT, developed interdisciplinary work, supported closer and better relationships with local institutions and parents, gained experience in international cooperation and strengthened the European dimension.