STAND UP, SPEAK OUT!

Project summary

"STAND UP, SPEAK OUT!” Was created by four partners from Spain, Romania, Italy and Latvia. It tried to respond to the need to reduce early school dropout, as established by the European Strategy 2020. For this, our project was focused on pupils as agents of social change, with a series of educational strategies. The celebration of the Year of Cultural Heritage 2018 in Europe was an inspiration to our project and promptly constituted the backbone of it. “STAND UP! SPEAK OUT!” participants celebrated meetings in each school (in Spain, Rumania and Italy, the last meeting was supposed to take place in Latvia but finally was celebrated online due to the COVID-19 pandemic), they met locals and spoke up against bullying and learnt how to cope with this problematic using the PTE (Peer Tutoring among Equals). They also arranged different activities to train both students and teachers in active methodologies (such as Project-Based Learning, Game-Based Learning or Cooperative Learning), created activities founded on their different social and cultural contexts and showed their results in every school. This project gave room to the participants to share their personal and professional experiences and encouraged them to foster better relationships among teachers and students. The project promoted the creations of community bonds and urged the participants to stand up for their rights in their communities by using the local and regional media and requesting an audience with the local organizations. The broad objective of STAND UP! SPEAK OUT project was to improve the inclusion of students with special needs. This project intended to create strategies to deal with absenteeism and bullying issues. During its implementation period, we maintained the specific objectives. We designed strategies that prevent early school dropout (O1) based on motivation and active methodologies. As well as this, we strengthened skills and competencies that favour social inclusion (O2) by studying the different local approaches and sharing our viewpoints on the subject. Besides, teachers involved in this project encouraged students with social difficulties to participate and guided their families providing them with information and support to make their applications, etc. The four schools that participated in this project learnt more about the achievements of European youth throughout history (O3) as shown in our classroom projects. When it comes to innovative methodologies that favour the cooperation of students and their empowerment (O4), several workshops took place during the mobilities. There, teachers from every school learnt more about active methodologies and how to train their colleagues once at home and saw different techniques to implement them at their schools. This means that we also promoted the use of collaborative tools in Project-Based Learning (O5) and a collaborative network of students was set up by them in Italy as one of the main activities promoted in C3. English was used as a lingua franca during the whole project, which supposed a crucial improvement of the students’ communication skills, according to our English Language teachers. Evaluation and dissemination of the project (O8) was a priority for us, special space was given to the evaluation and to create a unified strategy of dissemination at the end of every meeting. Apart from that, we constantly discussed this point by email and within our weekly meetings. As a result of the teachers' training, our schools developed several classroom activities that covered all of our initial objectives. We wanted to celebrate our common bonds as European citizens starting from the very beginning. That is how Mythological creatures was created in the first place. It was not only a historiographic approach to the local myths and legends but also an opportunity to let the creative spirit of our pupils fly to show us that we all made part of the same community with loads of customs in common and also teenagers can benefit from those common roots. Students wrote a text telling the story of a local mythological creature and then draw their creature. They presented their works in Italy and discussed with students from other countries about the common characters. Vestigia Humanitatis started as a literary contest among the four schools. It consisted of thinking of classical European mottos or idioms and writing a brief composition giving an opinion, expressing their feelings o revisiting the moral of the story. Students learned multiple things from their past and their identity and were encouraged to use this knowledge to be aware of the power they had as citizens. In order to acquire the means required for that, we continued learning and playing with European History by writing Letters from the Past (students wrote those letters pretending to be different historical characters), experienced new interpretations of human rights (in the performance Human Rights and blacklight -an STEAM project led by Arts teachers- and Human Rights Research, that gave them a model of research in the social science field) and European Identity through its cultural heritage (a collage proposal that involved teachers and students from very different subjects during a whole term). As part of our interest in implementing active methodologies in our schools, teachers followed a four-day workshop in Castro Urdiales at the beginning of the project. Once at home, they replicated the training with their colleagues and implemented the new methodologies at their schools. An example of this concern could be the Italian activity Game of goose for recycling. We followed the same strategy -teaching workshops in the mobilities and local replications of the courses once at home- when it comes to the DIELP, STARBURSTING and problem-solved techniques. As we mentioned before, we organized four mobilities (the last one became a virtual one because of the pandemic restrictions). C1 (TEACHERS FOR INCLUSION) was held in Spain and it aimed to create a teacher core in which a group of professionals shared different views on active methodologies and followed a four-day workshop that they could replicate in their schools. The teachers that visited Castro Urdiales had the opportunity to learn more about the local absenteeism program and they experienced coteaching with local students as well. C2 (COUNT ON ME) resulted to be an amazing opportunity to become aware of the different ways of managing inclusion at school. Both students and teachers benefitted from a welcoming environment where they presented the projects raised by their local teams and invited their partners to reproduce them and share their results to contrast them. C3 (LIFE-LONG SOCIAL NETWORK), guided by the Italian team, that was acquainted with the DIELP and STARBURSTING techniques, became a total success as long as the four teams learnt new problem-solving skills. As well as that, two fundamental tasks were fulfilled: a life-long social network was created by students and for both students and teachers, and the Spanish team explained the main characteristics of their Peer Tutoring Among Equals program and showed its potential dealing with absenteeism and bullying. Even if the global situation at the time was clearly difficult, C5 (ALL FOR ONE) was celebrated through E-Twinning as proof of the positive synergies that emerged from the dialogue among our four schools. Since the activity was raised online, much more students had the chance to participate in the workshops, present their activities and discuss them with students from other countries. The main participants in this project were the students of the four schools that formed this partnership. They run workshops, joined the social networks, created the logo, participated actively in the dissemination process by talking to the radio, writing in the local media or leading Erasmus+ information campaigns in our schools. Apart from running classroom projects, they also made presentations and gave constant feedback to the teachers' board to assist in the evaluation of the project. As our goal was to encourage students to speak up for themselves and their communities, they were the leading participants in the classroom activities, which means that teachers only guided them by showing the main ideas and giving them the means that they needed. It must be said that every activity was always under control and teachers urged the students to foster good relations with the local community so that they could represent local youth in the city council or get in touch with local organizations. In order to achieve that, we stimulated them to take responsibility for their acts by giving them an important role in the evaluation and dissemination strategies. Besides, as they had the leading role in the Peer Tutoring program we encouraged them to participate actively in school life, raising their voice against bullying, violence and discrimination. Teachers from the four countries have benefitted from this project by learning, practising and implementing active methodologies, such as Project-Based Learning, Cooperative Learning, Gamification or Problem Solving methods. As well as this, they also trained their ICT skills and had the opportunity to show their improvements in this field in the last meeting, that took place online. Regarding the students, they learnt the practice of those methods, too. They experimented with them within the class by creating innovative activities whose aim was to discover European history and identity and to show how to develop a European active citizenship. They were encouraged to share their works and results with the students from other countries in each Learning, Teaching and Training activities. Besides that, they showed the project and their participation in front of their teachers in a board meeting, on the local radio and in many other ways. The project results can be measured in many ways, quantitative and qualitative ones. The Erasmus+ was a life-changing experience for many of the students, that will treasure those moments for their entire lives. The opportunity of working in a relaxed environment was appreciated by their classmates. As well as the fact that their teachers urged them to be creative and curious enough to develop their research and that they showed that heir young voices deserved to be heard at school but, above all, in their local communities. The involved teachers felt lucky to have the opportunity to show the way they feel about education and share other viewpoints with colleagues from other countries. Families proved that they are the core of every educational project. Hosting families dedicated their time and their private space to the foreign students, and they did it with tons of love. We must highlight the importance of those everyday-life moments which usually are the memories that will last longer in our minds. In terms of material results, the project has concluded several works, most of them mentioned above. In addition to all the foregoing, teachers from the four schools generated a set of materials regarding different strategies to cope with absenteeism, how to manage inclusion or deal with bullying issues. Apart from their technical interest they are an important outcome so they included different national programs, came with case studies, activity proposals and the results of the roundtable about the subject.