The project "DREAM-Juggling among cultures: DRama dancE Arts Music for a Multicultural Europe" is an Erasmus+ project of four schools from Germany, Italy, Spain and Lithuania. The German school will coordinate the project. The duration of the project is two years and it is set up for students aged 15 to 19. The main objective of the project is to strengthen students' self-esteem and intercultural awareness by undertaking (inter)cultural activities in order to be able to engage and actively participate in our multicultural societies. The objectives aimed at in this project are making all of the participants aware of their historical and social background and highlighting the similarities and differences of their cultures. By presenting arts from the countries they live in, students with multicultural backgrounds are given the chance to identify more with the respective culture. The topic of arts is chosen since it is a higher leveller of motivation at school so that even students with academic difficulties improve their language and social skills. By collaborating and producing different kinds of arts in transnational groups, the students will find an opportunity to communicate with the others in order to get self-esteem. There are 102 participants travelling to learning, teaching and training activities (72 students, 30 teachers). At transnational meetings staff from the arts departments of the hosting institution will be involved to conduct parts of the activity. Also, local institutions such as a Culture Center and a local theater will be involved in each activity. At a joint staff training event best-practice dealing with how the schools tackle the problem of multiculturalism will be exchanged. Also, a guideline for enriching classes through multiculturalism will be compiled which will be used for the entire project, reviewed at the final meeting and which will be implemented at all partner schools at the end of the project. At the following short-term exchanges of students, students will present different aspects of arts from their home countries and together in transnational groups create new "fusion" art (art, dance, drama, music). Members from the school communities but also from the local communities will be invited to visit the presentation of the common piece of arts produced at each meeting. Also, local newspapers and radio stations will be invited to publish about the events. Besides, activities will be filmed for the final movie. At the first student activity in Italy students will engage with the question where Europeans come from historically by exploring archaeoligical sights and by comparing them with other European places. Next, the question of who we are in dance will be looked at at the second student meeting in Lithuania. Also, a survey on stereotypes about the partner countries will be created which will be evaluated at the next meeting in Spain. The findings as well as examples of successful intercultural encounter will be presented in short role plays and the students practise storytelling when discussing the question of how others see us. Finally, at the final meeting in Germany students discuss where we, as European cititzens are going by engaging with music and by taking part in an intercultural workshop. Students will be trained to be Ambassadors of Multiculturalism and organize a multicultural event at their schools after the project-funded time period. The final movie is edited and finalized. The impact of the project at long term will be the raised awareness for the benefits of multiculturalism at school, in local communities and at European level. During the (multi-)cultural events during the learning, teaching and training activities, students, teachers, staff and all invited guests will experience how enriching different cultural backgrounds can be not only when creating pieces of art but also when learning together at school or when living together in a multicultural society. At long term, this will be put to practice by using and disseminating the guideline for enriching classes through multiculturalism elaborated during the project. Moreover, the student ambassadors are encouraged to organize regular events at their schools at which they continue to raise the awareness that different ethnic and cultural backgrounds are not an issue but an enrichment. Furthermore, all students who are involved in the project will gain self-esteem - either by creating and presenting their own culture and pieces of (multi-)cultural art in front of a multicultural public or by being a spectator of these events. For example, spectators with multicultural backgrounds can be motivated to be proud of being multicultural by seeing its benefits and taking the presenters as role models. This will foster social inclusion and can contribute to prevent early school leaving. The final movie will be published on different websites to create a similar impact on spectators from different countries.
The implementation of the project was in line with the project application. All minor changes that were made are documented in the Interim Report. The pandemic situation due to COVID 19 nearly brought the project to a standstill. The final meeting in Germany where the students were supposed to engage with music and take part in an intercultural workshop in May 2020, had to be postponed and redeschuled to February 2021. The situation was aggravated further by the fact that many of the participating students entered their final year of school preparing for their school leaving examinations. The teachers established regular online teachers' meeting on eTwinning and it was decided to finish the project with a virtual event. As a starter, the students prepared presentations on current music trends, traditional and the national anthem of their respective country and uploaded them in the Twin Space. Departing from the original idea of letting the students work with songs about spring, an international rap workshop was planned as singing together online proved to be too difficult. 18-20 students plus two teachers from each country participated in a 5-day online rap workshop in the afternoons, after class. The workshop was provided by Rapschool NRW, an organisation focussing on creative artwork with students from all over Germany and Europe. A German music teacher from Maximilian-Kolbe-Gymnasium (MKG) provided an online workshop for ten teachers from each country on how to produce easy rap music with students and use it in the foreign language classroom. After this workshop a mini project was started in grade 6 at MKG. The ideas from the workshop are supposed to have a long-term benefit on foreign language teaching at the schools. In the course of the students' rap workshop the students learned about the history and production of rap music. The German music teacher had composed a basic beat that was used as background music. The students discussed what Europe means to them and the aspects that were collected were used by each student to develop their own lines. Each students rapped his/her lines at home and sent the results to the organiser via WhatsApp who combined them into a rapsong. A Lithuanian student produced a video combining photos from the project with the rap song. This video was presented to the school communities at the four partner schools. This way, the original objectives of having the students engage with music and in an intercultural workshop as European citizens to produce a final movie, could be met. At MKG reports were published on the school website (www.mkg-koeln.de) and in local newspapers. A website was created for DREAM that is linked to the eTwinning page (www.mkg-dream.de). The final video was presented at the school's evening of Arts and Culture on 19 March 2021. On 4 July 2020 a Day of Diversity was held at school with a cultural dance workshop for the ERASMUS students. At Liceo Bagatta the European Day of Languages was celebrated on 26 September 2020 (https://bagattaerasmusdream.home.blog/european-day-of-languages/). The school participated in the European Day of Languages T-shirt Logo contest. Dissemination was done at the Erasmus corner at school, through the web pages https://bagattaerasmusdream.home.blog/ and newspaper articles (https://bagattaerasmusdream.home.blog/dissemination/ ). IES Jandula celebrated the international Day of Flamenco on 16 November 2020. ERASMUS DAYS were celebrated: On 15th and 16th of October 2020 a revision of all projects was made, and shown how Erasmus benefits the students. A video was displayed and all students were informed about the projects of this course, including DREAM. Besides, information was shared on the school's social networks (twitter, facebook, instagram) and webpage. A similar activity was held in 2019 (10-12 October). They also celebrated the European Day of Languages on 26 September 2019. Students from diverse origin read a manifesto in 7 different languages to promote multilingualism, the richness of linguistic diversity and the benefits of learning them. To disseminate their meetings, they also had interviews on local TV radio stations as well as news in the newspapers. Grigiškės Gymnasium organized the event "We are against racism" on January 10-31 helping students to better understand the problems of racism, ignore existing stereotypes, and develop tolerance.This way all four school were able to show that the students had become Ambassadors of Multiculturalism who will continue their work in the future by conducting a regular event of multiculturalism at their school and who will pass on their work to younger student generations so that their knowledge will not be lost. All project activities and outcomes have been described with presentations, worksheets and videos and made available for other Teachers who want to replicate the activities with their own classes on https://bagattaerasmusdream.home.blog/for-teachers/ .