Background: The consortium will promote ideas for tolerance activities in the school enviroment and in the long run to fight intolerance by engaging students and make them reflect upon cultural - and religious differences as well as other diffrences. We will also share experiences between teachers and how we in our daily profession are dealing with intolerance that occur in the classrooms. We will create lesson activities that can be shared by our colleagues in our schools and elsewhere. We believe that students and teachers need to work more in general with these issues. Schools should be a safe zone where one can be, act, think and feel without being questioned, exposed, or worst case scenario, being violated for it. Objectives: The main objective is to work with social inclusion in the school environment, this will be done through raising the level of awareness on: 1. Equal rights 2. Identity 3. Tolerance 4. Cultural differences and similarities 5. Stereotypes 6. Prejudices Partcipants will be the partners from UK, Finland, Italy, Hungary and Sweden, 32 teachers and 128 students. The age group ranges from 15-19 years of age and subjects taught by the teachers are Civics, History, Religious studies, English . The students represent a variety of programmes at each school therefore they will face a diversified group of students and will get an unempt number of opportunities to test their points of view on the issues to be discussed. Some of our students have never been abroad so the mobilities are very good introduction to meeting people in new environments and countries. The chosen partner schools represent the range of north - south, east - west of Europe. The different contexts that the schools are working in is also an important factor to take into consideration which will enhance the sharing of ideas and best practices. The problems we face in our societies are similar to a certain extent but there are differencies as well which will enrichen the discussions and activities further. Also the nationalistic movements in each country are creating tension which will affect the schools´ environments in respective country. Activities will be carried out during mobilities and in between them. The students will create pocket movies, power points , PDF newspaper, an app,surveys, questionnaires focusing on various aspects of the objectives . The activities during mobilities will also include cultural activities such as sightseeing, cooking, learning a little bit of the language spoken in the host country. the students are staying in host families which further enhances communication between partners and raises awareness in the issues we are working on. The teachers will be preparing the activities but also be in charge of lessons and work shops within the field in each hosting country. Methodologies used are all the tools mentioned above for highlighting the core ideas of the project. The opportunities given for the students are for instance discussions, debates, collaborative learning, skype meetings, contacts via Whatsapp, creating a Facebook account for the project,Google classroom. The key issue is to make the students to have face to face conversations on the issues tolerance and social inclusion in different ways and formats. Results/predictions are surely that the students will become more aware of their own attitudes concerning tolerance ,social inclusion, identity,equal rights,stereotypes, prejudices and cultural differencies and similarities. They have also gained tools for identifying stereotypes and prejudices as well as have become more creative in conveying the newly won skills to their peers and the world outside of schools.The project will give an opportunity for students to create contacts on a more personal level preferably lasting a life time and for the teachers creating net works with teachers in other school systems and countries in Europe. Future/longer term benefits will be the continuation on the project on school level because tolerance and social inclusion are issues that one needs to redefine for each generation. The project will enhance the teaching methods within the field and will give the students an insight in the field and food for thought. We hope also to strengthen the European identity and the responsibilities it involves.
The project promoted ideas and concepts to enhance and consolidate tolerance activities in the school environment, but also to fight and counter-act intolerance through engaging students in classroom activities. The project aimed to highlight similarities and differences between people and countries, which was done by talking about religious and cultural perspectives of different opinions. We shared also good practices between teachers and school staff for educational improvements concerning prejudice and stereotypes. We created classroom activities as well as "whole school activities" to underline the importance of fighting prejudice and embracing similarities between people. In order to raise awareness of negative attitudes that we (sometimes) held to each other, we debated democracy, equal rights (such as LGBT+ ), cultural differences (and similarities). We talked further about identities, social inclusion that enhance the trust between people. The activities and tasks that students were to implement were the living proof of all discussions and debates we had had. The students created for instance films, a newspaper with relevant articles linked to the project´s objectives, had debates, discussions, answered surveys on tolerance and took part in lectures . They also interviewed older relatives within the objectives and presented the results on one of the mobilities. The lectures were of great importance since they dealt with key factors of the project namely stereotypes, prejudices and how to overcome them. Results were conclusive that students became more aware of their own attitudes concerning tolerance, social inclusion, identity,equal rights, stereotypes, prejudices and cultural similarities and differences.. They also gained knowledge in how easily it is to identify stereotypes and prejudices through creative activities and tasks. The knowledge that we gained we used and disseminated to colleagues, other relevant school staff , teacher students from the university, colleagues at other schools nationally and internationally for the benefit of the project. We also became aware of how to be more creative in conveying the newly won skills to the students´peers and the world outside of schools. The project gave an opportunity for the students to create contacts on a more personal level preferably lasting for many years to come and for the teachers creating net works with teachers in other school systems and countries in Europe. We learned in the project how to formulate questions to prevent prejudices and fight stereotypes, how to have a balanced attitude towards how people choose to express themselves; to listen but also to question. By sharing good practices and other useful examples of both students and teachers we got many excellent insights in ideas and methods for our teaching. We also learned to debate and by that accepting each others´ differences. We became aware in depth of the mechanisms involved psychologically and sociologically when prejudices and stereotypes are involved in human activity. Above all the main realisation and learning experience was the importance of meeting eye to eye and be able to discuss and listen to each other even when the topics were complicated and at times difficult to grasp. The human interaction was absolutely the most vital point and discovering our similarities and differences in these matters of concern. The project had an extension due to the pandemic which was beneficial since we could finalize the project properly instead of forcing it to end. We were happy how everything turned out, even if the pandemic forced us to move online and end the project digitally in stead of a final physical mobility. All in all, we hope that European values always will be tolerance, acceptance and inclusion among other important values. The long - term benefits are clearly the opportunities given all our students when discovering various school systems, having been able to discuss and debate with their European counter parts, questioning themselves concerning the objectives, discovering the similarities and differences between the various partners and themselves and finally discovering a European dimension where we all are living in . After all we are all the same but slightly different.