Strengthen Relationships and Increase Friendship to Make Europe More Open - Improve Integration Ullvigymnasiet in Köping is a high school with approximately 1000 students in both college-preparatory and vocational programs. A considerable part of our students are newly arrived immigrants and we have many students with a foreign background. Köping is a small town with a rather segregated society where it is not natural to associate across cultural, social and ethical borders. This can also be seen in school. At the same time, we meet students who want to become a part of a more integrated society. The Charlie Chaplin school in Lyon, France, deal with integration in a different way than we do in Köping, Sweden. We want to strengthen and develop this contact. As many of the students at Ullvigymnasiet are not used to meeting people from different cultures, we want to start a project where the students make contact with other young people from France. At the same time, we want the students to start talking about integration, traditions, and culture, thus becoming more insightful and aware of their own cultural traits as well as other people’s culture and tradition. In the future, many of our students will work with people, especially those on the healthcare and childcare programs. We want to give them tools for the future as well as an understanding of others. All students at both high schools will be involved in this integration project through lectures, joint activities, and events for exemple two parties/evenings of integration 2019 and 2020. Every year, approximately 20 students from each school will be tied more directly to the project as they will be part of the exchange, including communicating with, meeting and housing students from the other country. Among the activities, we plan an investigation of your own culture, as well as a survey of how we see each other and care for one another in our society. This survey will be carried out at the beginning of and at the end of the project. This will help us see what can be developed to improve and contribute to good relationships between people from different cultures. These activities will be carried out in both schools. During the four meetings between students from Ullvigymnasiet and Charlie Chaplin, we will discuss differences and similarities between the cultures to create an openness to others that will help integration. The methods we will use are organized conversations, reflection to development of critical thinking. We will also do some practial activities so our students will develope deeper understanding about integration. They will also help each other to create an evening with diffrent activities for the public in their cities, Lyon and Köping 2019 and 2020.The students will get a friend from the other country to exchange email with and talk to through social media or other sources. When they meet in real life during the exchange they will partake in each other's lessons and they will visit a healthcare facility and a childcare facility here in Sweden. Many of the activities are focused on getting to know one another and on talking about integration and how we can make Europe more open. We will also meet and interact with young people who have only been in Sweden a short period of time and our students will partake in developing our communities and strengthen good relationships. The results we expect to achieve are making our students more aware of the importance of good integration and what can be done to achieve that. We also want our students to experience international contacts and open up their homes to a foreigner, allowing them to be part of their every day lives. We also want the parents of our students to experience how important and valuable it is to get to know people from other cultures, as do we want to spread this to the local community of Köping and that of Lyon through local media and social media. Seeing as all students in the school will be involved in the project we expect them to become curious and more open to new contacts with peers from another culture. We also want our vocational students to get tools for their future working life when facing different cultures. Our goal is that the two high schools in Lyon and Köping will be prepared for the future and that we will become aware of what resources already exist in our community and how to benefit from people with different backgrounds when interacting and realizing that different people contribute with different strengths and a unique competence.
Both France and Sweden have many immigrants, but the two countries deal with immigration and integration in different ways. However, we both face problems with integration and segregation. The object of our project was to learn from each other, make our students more aware of the importance of good integration, thus preparing them for the future. We wanted our students to become aware of the benefits of having people with different backgrounds in society, in school and at the workplace, seeing as different people contribute with different strengths and a unique competence. By comparing how we do things differently in France and Sweden, we wanted them to become aware of what we already do that works and learn new ways from the other culture. In order to do so, we planned four exchanges between France and Sweden. Unfortunately, due to Covid-19 we were only able to carry out three of these trips. The first group of Swedish students travelled to Lyon, France, in the autumn 2018. In spring 2019, a group of French students travelled to Sweden, and in the autumn 2019 a new group of Swedish students travelled to France. The final group of French students were supposed to visit Sweden at the end of March, 2020. That trip was first postponed for September, 2020, but due to the continued severity of Covid-19 we had to cancel that trip all together. In the first exchange, the focus was on seeing the everyday life of the other culture. The students lived in the home of another student, visited their lessons, and experienced typically French and Swedish activities and culture. In addition to that, we compared and contrasted the cultures in discussions. After presenting immigration through the times in France and Sweden, the French students presented a photo collage on the topic to the Swedish students. Both the presentations and the collage helped the students understand immigration better which showed in the discussions afterwards as well as in their evaluations. In the second exchange, the focus was on working together and thus getting to know the different cultures. In France, we prepared and performed a poetry slam together. The theme of the poems was integration and living together. The poetry slam was performed in front of an audience at the end of the week. During this trip we were invited to the Major’s office to meet with the Major of Décine-Charpieu, the area in which the school is situated. The planned trip that didn’t take place also had a cultural activity planned for the whole week with a presentation at the end of the week. During both years of the project, the students wrote about the various aspects of the project in a joint blog. At the end of each exchange we made evaluations to see what the students thought they had learned from it. Many students wrote that they had learned a lot about immigration and integration, that this project had opened their eyes and made them think more about their own culture and why they do what they do, and that this project has helped them understand how much we need integration and how much we get by doing so. It is hard to predict the long-term benefits of a project like this, but all change starts with the individual. If we have managed to affect the thinking of more than 80 students the effects should be great. The fact that the two schools involved in this project have thought about, worked with, compared, and tried to come up with idéas on this topic, will undoubtedly affect the thinking of the schools for the future. We understand that this does not change over night, but we have taken the first steps towards change. Our idéas have also been spread in local newspapers and on local TV, in addition to the blog and the websites and social media of the two schools.