Inclusive education is a central issue to the achievement of high quality education for all learners and the development of more inclusive societies. It is essential to achieve social equity and it is a basic element of lifelong learning. Promoting equity in educational opportunities is a clear strategic challenge for the EU member States and for all schools that feel responsible of building more inclusive societies. From this point of view the educational offer of our schools needs significant improvement. In the last decades our societies have suffered many changes, from the humanitarian tragedy of refugees crisis to high unemployement rate with an increase of inequality and poverty. The reactions have been different and in some areas of our countries conflicts have spread out together with discrimination or intolerant attitudes towards diversity or the disadvantaged, hence the need of investing in Inclusive Education. The participation in a Erasmus plus project will give our schools a significant help to promote inclusiveness, address equality. We need to give students equal opportunities to promote themselves at school, local community and future professional environment. Erasmus+ project provides students with the competences needed to lead independent, fulfilling lives. It helps them find their place in our societies and develop a sense of a European identity, one that complements our national, regional and local identities. Self-confidence, adaptability, openness, mutual understanding, are only a few examples of what can be gained through Erasmus+ experience. When pupils and staff have the opportunity to meet "others" to exchange ideas, they often find similarities that create lasting bonds. Welcoming attitudes and Inclusion should start at school to provide young people with critical thinking to contrast social prejudice spreadind through some social medias or simply risen by general fear. We want to create the best opportunity to see how other countries and schools face the contemporary common challenges and start the cooperation with them. We aim at showing our students that we are equals in diversity and everyone who sets goals and makes an effort to strive for implementation has a great chance of success. The cooperation with peers of different languages and cultures will play a key role in enhancing social cohesion and intercultural dialogue. This project should be carried out transnationally to foster Social Inclusion and European shared values. Students are bound to learn much more from live experience, making on-the-spot workshops with their European peers than just watching or reading experience. School is the privileged place to grow up a generation according to the European values of solidarity, non discrimination, tolerance,equality. The strategic partnership of five countries will start a shared route which will lead to the promotion of Social Inclusion theough a more Inclusive Education, also non-formal education. Five countries are put into action to BREAK SOCIAL PREJUDICE, to foster EQUALITY, to promote INTEGRATION and INCLUSION. Each meeting will be a step forward. Students, teachers and local community through a series of inspiring activities will experience mutual understanding, mutual learning, solidarity . Dramas and spots, a spot in the host countries shooted by students of the participants partnership.Each spot will require students working on the issues, giving their vision of the theme and striving to achieve the task and goal planned. The centerpiece is in the innovative inclusive methodology put into action to involve as many students as possible, to support them all, from the most disadvantaged to the strongest ones, from students with special education needs to the less motivated. Activities set out steady cooperation among participants. Sport friendly match, cultural and historic routes to the discovery of European commomn origins, culinary routes where food and culinary traditions will be the symbol of integration, a challenging context where even the weakest student will feel successful and proud. Theatre activities will be most challenging activities: students will choose symbolic stories of discrimination, they will study and work on the theme to write scripts ( monologues/drama) they will perform their scripts working in team. Students will experience integration and equality as guarantee of peaceful future society, learn about the history, culture, traditions and food of the partners countries. They will Improve their communicative competence in English, develop competence in European citizenship, develop and improve their ability in ICT. Teachers will strengthen their professional profile, learn and exchange innovative teaching approaches based on learner centred methods and increase motivation for future actions. The participant schools will raise their European dimension and foster integration in local community.
On the Move for Social Inclusion carried out by five Mediterranean countries with the common need of promoting a more Inclusive education offer at school Thanks to this project a big number of students lived an otherwise unreachable experience Students and families were given great opportunities:a deeper awareness of the European dimension, greater education environment, the experience of European identity and citizenship. The pupils, their families, school communities and teacher staff experienced the opportunity to meet the"other" to exchange ideas and create lasting bonds. First curiosity,then motivation raised by feeling part of a “whole”, gave birth to welcoming attitudes and critical thinking that finally swept away the old prejudices and wrong attitudes developping adaptability, openness, mutual understanding. The students of the five countries became main actors of their change of mind. The schools of the partnership shared the common need of helping students to overcome wrong feelings like social prejudice, fear of the others, discrimination. We all needed to promote identity through European citizenship, to improve linguistic and digital skills that would make our pupils “more equal”. Month after month, mobility after mobility, through inspiring activities, wonderful travels, landscapes, new families, experiencing different traditions, customs, foods and points of view our partnership got the goals that we planned for the project: social inclusion, a more inclusive education We started aTwinning project to have a safe platform where our students could meet and know each other, introduce themeselves, their country,school life.The Twinspace of the project provided the students with a safe space to work together,exchange ideas and improve their English and ICT skills. Then we introduced new platforms to make our students working together before mobilities,keeping them cooperating when creating Padlets, webMagazines, Smore flyers, google drive shared files. Cooperative learning,peer learning, learning by doing and learning by challenge were the methods we used to offer a more inclusive and catchy way of learning. Before each mobility we held meetings and communicated steadly in order to ensure good quality of the LTTA and providing students with safe travels, accomodation and journey. During the mobilities we visited the local institutions and the schools of the hosting countries,places of historical interest, museums, ancient historical buildings and then workshops thanks to the involvement of expert English guides when in Pompei, Vitorìa Gasteiz, Cappadokia,Edessa. Hosting students acted as guides for their foreign schoolmates at school,during spare time and at home with their hosting families.could raise We could rise the European dimension of our school communities, foster integration:during each mobility we planned to spend most of the time at the hosting school not only to learn about other school systems but to live some days as if we were part of that school community,to learn the culture,customs and habits of the Neapolitans, Spanish, Turkish, Greeks. In that way students, families and teachers realised to be more European, more “equal in our diversity”.Hosting revealed to be a strong point to highlight the impact of the activities and of the project. This Erasmus+ project revealed to be a greater experience than we could imagine. For the italian country as “new comer” the project had the power to show another face of Europe,that face that in our disadvantaged southern part of italy we weren’t able to see yet. The new strong feelings of solidariety, friendship, equality, amazement of the participant students are reflected in all the activities and products they created from the Logo,the twinspaceto the online magazines, the videos.. Unfortunately pandemics of Covid19 spread out at the end of our fourth mobility to Greece.It was a shock in our lives and the life of the project. Nonetheless our Erasmus+ experience and the special bonds we created worked like a stimolous to go on and not be overwhelmed by the difficulty of the situation. We felt the need of sharing our experience even more than before,even if just online.Students and teachers shared their thoughts and feeling about ordinary life during covid time.Students needed to exchange their feeling with their Erasmus friends so we implemented online meetings and cooperation We asked for the extension of the project , first we asked for six months extension and then we asked for further six months, but performing the physical mobility still appeared too optimistic so we decided to perform our last mobility to Portugal onlibe, we held our first virtual mobility. It was another kind of meeting, we could not experience the strong feelings and happiness of the previous mobilites, not even we could perform the same kind of activities, nonetheless we tried to take the best out of the situation and we enjoyed all the same.