Research evidence has sought to examine challenges on understanding students with Special Education Needs and the difficulties experienced in different learning situations. The overarching problem identified is that students with various disorders in contrast to identifying a single static primarily brain-based deficit, are increasingly perceived as out of sync with their internal and external environments experiencing difficulties to enable operations from their peripheral nervous systems. The noisiness that seems to occur in both spectrums of the neural flow cause profound dysfunctionality related to rhythm and timing of movement which has direct implications in the way certain types of students with special needs communicate, interact with their social surroundings and sensory system such as vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell and balance. Evidently, to provide research-informed and applicable solutions to this problem, the role of rhythm and timing in helping certain types of students to reduce overload and to create a symmetry to their sensory system which in turn may amplify their learning skills, capabilities and competencies has a significant potential and can lead to innovative approaches to foster inclusion in classrooms with students with and without Special Education Needs. This potential can be linked to music and dance, as the two major art forms that are directly related to rhythm and need synchronization between different body parts and multiple sensory inputs. By employing music and dance to design and implement creative learning interventions, students actively explore and make sense of their environment by embedding rhythm into social interactions which are rich in figures and context. To explore this potential of rhythm in promoting inclusion in European schools, the rhythm4inclusion project will first identify the needs and requirements of teachers that are confronted with the task to address the needs of students with and without special needs co-existing in the same class, identify the innovative elements that can be brought in these situations by integrating music and dance, develop a rhythm-based inclusion curriculum combined with a digital competences framework for teachers. This last element aims at developing skills and competences that will allow teachers to explore modern digital technologies to collaborate with the colleagues as well as with distant psych-pedagogy experts and document their practices either to share and reuse them or to receive valuable feedback from special education experts. The project supports teachers in their path to integrating arts for fostering inclusion by primarily piloting of the project (2nd project year) and the creation and delivery of the online training programme (3rd project year). The training programme will enable teachers across Europe to embed multi-arts into their daily teaching to teach curricular subjects and foster social inclusion. Through the piloting and training programme, teachers with no artistic training will be enabled to use the arts and overcome obstacles deriving from inhibitions and sense of inadequacy towards their own artistic abilities. They will gain knowledge of a method with innovative and successful practices to use with their students. The Online Training Programme will consist into several parts, dedicated to selected art forms for rhythm-based learning interventions (music and dance), parts dedicated to the psycho-pedagogical framework that is necessary to understand how the proposed learning interventions should be designed, supported and evaluated, and parts that dedicated to the acquisition of important digital competencies that will allow teachers to exploit digital technologies in order to participate actively in communities of practice, document their work, share their experiences and find new professional development opportunities. The final project outputs in terms of rhythm-based inclusion curriculum, teacher training materials and teachers’ Community of Practice, all supported by a modern eLearning platform enabling its widest possible use will be used by school teachers facing serious difficulties in their work with disruptive or problematic and disordered students with the provision of clear and concise guidelines and techniques, as well as information on the implementation and evaluation process. Through the rhythm4inclusion platform a high and increasing number of teachers will participate in this Community of Practice by continuously receiving feedback from the expert team or by creating their own “virtual field of sharing and exchanging knowledge and practice” with their colleagues internationally that would spread the results and push for the introduction of ground-breaking strategies/ techniques within school contexts in countries that are suffering from the lack of multidimensional and innovative educational methods in the era of e-reality and innovation in education.
The rhythm4inclusion project directly addressed the need to promote social inclusion in European Classrooms by developing, piloting and applying an innovative methodology to combine music and dance to promote social, emotional and learning skills of students focusing on mixed classrooms that include children with special needs. The innovative learning approach promoted by the project is the use of rhythm to enhance the students' skills and create an atmosphere of collaboration and respect in the classroom. The project partners have years of experience in using arts. In specific dance and music integration in traditional school curricula. They have also undertaken significant training programmes to enable teachers to use the arts in their teaching practices. This project moved one step beyond to focus on rhythm (both in music and in dance and their combination) and piloted ways to use rhythm to promote student engagement and collaboration while at the same time promote classroom management for effective inclusion of all children in the learning process including children with Special Education Needs. The involvement of participants in the different activities of the project proceeded gradually starting with the participation of the partners’ personnel and selected artists and teachers directly linked to the partners, from the start of the project, and ending with a wide participation of artists and teachers in pre-primary, primary and secondary education during the online training programme of the project that was implemented in the last semester of the project. The project developed a curriculum and implemented an online training programme offering to the teachers the necessary skills and knowledge to promote inclusive learning by using arts and in specific music and dance, secondly by acquiring psycho-pedagogical skills and knowledge that enabled identify the unique characteristics and needs of their students including students with Special Education Needs and build an atmosphere of collaboration and trust in the classroom in an engaging way. The project also promoted the acquisition of digital skills by teachers and developed a Digital Competences Assessment Framework that is inline with current developments on EU level (DigiCompEdu framework). The number of participants in the online training programme organized by the project reached 230. Most of them were teachers in primary and pre-primary education. Furthermore, teachers in secondary education and artists have actively participated. Several participants were teachers in Special Education. During the implementation of the training programme, apart from following the weekly webinars and accessing the training materials prepared by the project partners, the participants were able to discuss the applicability of the rhythm4inclusion approach and how it can enhance their daily teaching practices. Lesson plans that showcase the rhythm4inclusion methodology in the form of rhythmical exercise were developed by participants at the end of the training programme. A final evaluation questionnaire was also distributed to them. The results collected clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the rhythm4inclusion approach and the need of teachers to use this approach in order to effectively address student inclusion and create a collaborative atmosphere in the classroom while promoting creativity and playful learning that engage students and cultivates important psychosocial skills. An important aspect of the project was its dissemination strategy, starting from the first phase of the project, to reach the greater number of teachers, raise awareness about the project topics and diffuse project results in the wider possible audience. Several dissemination events were organized including a number of multiplier events, one in each participating country and a final project conference organized in Edsbyn, Sweden by the coordinator that was organized as a blended event with local and remote participants, thus extending the possibilities of participation and sharing the project results. Scientific publications and articles in local media and TV reports were another important means of dissemination. Two special sessions were organized with the context of the IMCL 2019 and the IEEE/EDUCON 2021 conferences.