Our project is addressed to teenagers aged 12-18, who are the European citizens in the nearest future. We want to encourage students to work with each other respectfully, understanding diversity as an enriching element; we want them to acquire and develop competences that enable them to integrate better into society and enter the labor market or higher education. We expect them to learn to listen to the other, to understand the other’s point of view, and, through dialogue and compromise, to find out solutions to possible disagreements. Furthermore, we want them to be able to help their peers to solve conflicts reaching an agreement of respect and tolerance, helping to the integration of all the members of the community. Developing these competences at school, we expect our students become responsible citizens committed to their closest social setting as well as to the European society, having as their own the values of respect to diversity, understanding, cooperation, equality and solidarity, and considering dialogue as an essential part of coexistence. All the students at every partner school will participate in the project: about 60 of them will be directly implied participating in student exchanges, while the rest of them will be involved too, as they will participate in other activities and/or will be affected by results of the project. Teachers from different areas are implied in the project, especially those dealing with Peer Mediation and other projects related to Soft Skills at every school. We will develop activities addressed to find out common problems students face at school related with the relationship among them (disrespect, bullying, rejection, lack of social abilities, disrupting behaviour, racism, sexism, …) and to exchange strategies and methods to deal with these issues. But we will do it having the students as the centre of the activities: teachers will cooperate with them and will help them to analyse their problems and find out solutions based on the values we have mentioned above. We will elaborate a booklet which will collect an action plan for specific situations (new students arriving during the school year; freshers in their first year...) as well as all the strategies we have exchanged with the partner schools to improve our students’ social and civic competences, and, consequently, coexistence in our schools. We will disseminate the activities we have carried out, the documents we have elaborated (videos, leaflets, posters, booklet...) and the benefits of participating in an Erasmus+ project in cooperation with other European Schools. The results we expect are that our students feel social and civic values as their own, and as an essential part of Europe itself. This will be reflected in our schools, in our student’s after-school lives and in our society. The strategies, abilities, competences and results of this project are not only conceived to implement and develop a project: they are conceived to be included as part of the leading lines of a whole lasting school project.
OBJECTIVES The main goals of our project are: -make our students work with others being respectful, understanding diversity as an enriching element; -learn to listen to others so that, through dialogue and compromise, they find solutions to possible disagreements; -and, finally, make that learning useful to help their partners to solve conflicts. ACTIVITIES AT SCHOOL The Project has been focused on Peer Mediation and on analysing and finding solutions to those problems shared by the students at the three partner schools; the activities developed have been the following ones: • Peer Mediation Training Sessions • Analysis of the problems shared by the students at the partner schools: bullying, discrimination of any kind,… Causes were analysed and possible solutions were proposed. • Commemoration of different International Days to make students reflect on different current affairs. • Celebration of different cultural events at the three schools. • Celebration of contests to choose the informational poster and the representative logo of our Project, as well as the logo of the Peer Mediation Team. • Dissemination of the Project beyond schools: institutions such as Local Governments or Old People Associations, among others, have participated in different activities. • Inclusion of families in the Project through Parents Association and, especially, during the activities organized to welcome the students participating in the Mobilities. All these activities have been made visible through posters and other graphic elements elaborated by students, and through the web, press and Facebook, as well as by means of the previously mentioned contests. LEARNING, TEACHING AND TRAINING ACTIVITIES: The 3 partner schools had a first meeting in Portugal to organize the activities to carry out during the academic year 2018/2019. At the end of that year, a second meeting of teachers was held in Germany in order to analyse the development of the Project up to that moment and organize the activities to carry out during the year 2019/2020. Three students exchange (mobilities) have taken place in the three participating countries to work on Peer Mediation, discrimination and bullying, successively. WORK STRATEGY: COLLABORATIVE WORK and STUDENTS FOCUSED LEARNING COLLABORATIVE WORK: Work has been developed in a collaborative way at every moment; the coordinators of the 3 schools have held online meetings every two weeks and communication through email or WhatsApp has been continuous and fluent. As indicated, two teachers’ face-to-face meetings have been held to coordinate and organize activities. And at every school, the Erasmus teachers’ teams have met weekly to coordinate and do a follow-up of the activities of the project. In relation with the students, collaborative work has been promoted through activities implying dialogue, agreements and making collective decisions to develop the activity and/or get a result. On the other hand, the students at the different schools have also worked in teams to prepare the activities to develop during the mobilities; and during the mobilities, the results obtained have been discussed in groups formed by students from the countries, so that the final conclusions have been a result of this collaborative work. STUDENT’S FOCUSED LEARNING Although the organization and sequencing of activities have been designed by the teachers of the Erasmus teams of every partner school, students have been the focus of the project: the topic and objectives of an activity were given to the students, and they proposed and developed the activities. In this way they have been responsible of their own work and of the results obtained with it. The results have been really positive: they have worked in teams, they have managed their time, they have got a result and they have shown it to their partners. RESULTS: In the long term, the implementation of Peer Mediation will be an indispensable element and a referent for coexistence at every school. Another benefit we expect from the project is the impact produced on the students, especially on those participating in the mobilities: they have realized that they share the same problems and worries as students from other cultures and countries, that there are no differences among them. They have understood what “having prejudices” means, and they have checked they are not positive. To have a look to the activities of the project, you can visit this site https://external.educa2.madrid.org/web/centro.ies.anammatute.velilla/erasmus-