The project aims to combine three different methodologies for using performing arts in order to develop and support people with special needs. These methodologies are: to use performing arts as a therapist tool, as an instrument of social inclusion and as a facilitator of their performance skills. It will allow the teachers and education professionals to know how important is to provide our students a tool that will help them to express their feelings and social competences. Besides, it will improve their oral language and communication skills, enhancing their own body knowledge and working with their body language and kinestetic abilities. At the same time, this activity contributes to the personal development, both as an element of social inclusion and individual growth. As the performing arts are a powerful tool for fighting the social exclusion, we consider that working with it would favour all the integration aspects so highly needed by our students. The final goal is that our students enjoy the creation of performing arts and creative activities without other claim. On the other hand, it is essential that professionals have a special training in performing arts, exchange good practices and create methodological resources to our centers. The project will have two types of mobility exchanges, staff and staff with students. In the first and second quarter of each mobility exchange phase, the activities and objectives will be coordinated in the centers. In the third quarter, there will be an assessment of the proposed objectives. And finally, at the end of the third quarter, where the mobility exchange with students will take place, there will be a performance done by the students of each center. At the end of the project, the staff will have received quality training in performing arts and their professional profiles will be improved. Our centers will have developed and created tools to work on performing arts. It shall provide benefits for the students and professionals, who will be able to do artistic performances outside their local area and will have seen increased their participation in the cultural and social life through the performing arts.
We are four schools from Romania, Turkey, Spain and Italy. The first three are specific special education schools, all our students have functional diversity to a greater or lesser extent, and the Italian school is an ordinary secondary school, but with special education students integrated into the school. Our project tries to combine three conceptions of working with the performing arts with people with functional diversity or disability. As a therapeutic tool, as an instrument of social inclusion and finally as a quality show. During these two years and a bit, the pandemic has not allowed us, due to the dynamics of our project itself, to work as much as we would have done without it. We have suffered the intermittent confinement, the stable and closed groups of coexistence, the elimination of physical contact, the masks, etc. All these characteristics have made it very difficult to finish our project with full satisfaction and have left us with the bitter aftertaste of what could have been and could not have been. For us teachers, it is fundamental to provide our students with a way of putting within their reach a therapeutic tool that helps them to express their emotional world, their ability to communicate, their social skills, their knowledge of their own body, their personal autonomy and also allows them to acquire the necessary skills that involve movement, gesture and rhythm. This way of working with our pupils, which is new after the training we have received, has enriched our professional quality. It has allowed us to discover and work on abilities in our students that were simply ignored or attributed to their innate disabilities. Generating attitudes, emotions and behaviours that have allowed them to empower themselves and sometimes free themselves from stigmas that were wrongly assumed to be innate. Our students and professionals have worked on the activities and staging of the curriculum developed once a week. In this curriculum, we have developed four areas of work: emotional skills, movement, rhythm and body expression, social skills and communication. The four countries have participated in the development of this curriculum. At the same time, the whole project has contributed powerfully to the formative aspect, both from the point of view of social integration and individual growth. Our project has provided them with actions and interventions aimed at facilitating and enabling the development of their personal and social skills, assuming the leading role in their own socialisation process. We have also worked on aspects of integration and inclusion that our students need so much. And, finally, one more of our objectives, that our young people enjoy the creation of the performing arts and carry out artistic activities with no other pretension than to create spectacle. The pupils have participated with motivation and enthusiasm. We have worked with different groups during the project. Through the creation of artistic manifestations, they and we have been able to discover their creativity, their innovative contributions and their acting skills. We have carried out permanent rehearsals during the three courses in order to carry out artistic manifestations, in other areas, outside the school. Unfortunately, although we have continued to work internally, we were only able to carry them out during the first year. In summary, it has been fundamental for the professionals to train in the performing arts, to exchange good practices and to create methodological resources in the performing arts that have improved the quality of our centres. After detecting a deficit in our training, in our curriculum and in our practice with the performing arts as a transversal means of working with our students in different areas, we decided to carry out a project for the exchange of good performing arts practices, a means of creating curricular and methodological resources and training for our professionals. At the same time, it was an opportunity for our pupils to participate as protagonists in artistic activities that allowed them to achieve a degree of social autonomy, empowering them as creative individuals and raising their self-esteem. Our results have been positive for our students, our professionals and our schools. We have a new curriculum to work on the performing arts, we have boosted the self-esteem and inclusion of our pupils, the centres are committed to a stable performing arts group with the pupils, we have participated in informative and formative presentations (Theatre and disability).