The project "No stereotypes!" is a bilateral project of a school partnership, the participating schools are secondary schools from the Czech Republic (Karviná) and Turkey (Antalya). The project focuses on similarities and differences between our cultures, our traditions, customs, ways of life and on social inclusion. The project aims at giving the students and teachers an opportunity to deal with similarities and differences of cultures, with intercultural dialogue, human rights issues, and form and develop common European values and good life attitudes. The project aims at improving and developing key competences of the students and teachers, particularly those coming from disadvantageous groups. We are focusing particularly on communication, language, social, creative and IT competences. The motivation of the project is to support intercultural dialogue between students and teachers from two secondary schools from totally different cultural environment (Christian and Muslim country), support tolerance, respect towards human rights and freedoms of people as well as rise awareness about other cultures and traditions. The project includes both local activities and mobilities (learning/teaching/training activities). The participants of the project will develop particularly the following competences: a) Communication and language – workshops and groupwork will be organised in mixed Czech-Turkish groups so that the students could develop their communication skills in the English language. During mobilities we presume accommodation of the students in host families which will also help to develop their communication and language competence, together with the social ones. Students and teachers will also develop their communication skills in native language during local activities, preparing presentations about their school, town, country, traditions etc. The participants will also extend their vocabulary with words connected with culture, history, European issues etc. b) social – students and teachers come from different economic, geographical and social background which will allow them better realise and understand conditions and problems of their partners and will make them more aware of similarities and differences of cutures, traditions, customs or religion in both countries. Among the students there will also be those who come from disadvantageous groups so participants will develop their social competences by cooperation in a team with members from different background. Some of the activities will be also focused on the topics of intolerance and radicalisation of young people which will allow the students and teachers to exchange their ideas about solutions of this situation. c) digital – participants will also develop their digital competences using various IT tools. They will communicate via emails, messenger, Skype etc., participate in video-conferences on eTwinning portal and will work out the results of the project using IT tools (webpage, online dissemination materials, common magazines on eTwinning etc.). For our project we will also open a closed facebook group and a public facebook page where we will share some results. During local activities they will shoot interviews with local people about stereotypes towards other cultures so they will use their mobile phones and video-cameras and will use movie maker or other programs to create a video-document from the activity. d) Increasing cultural awareness – participants will improve their cultural competences during activities and workshops focused on similarities and differences, on traditions and feasts in both countries etc. held during mobilities, during cultural excursions both locally and during mobilities etc. They will also work on cultural presentations and will learn about traditions, feasts, typical meals and dances of the partner country. We will also produce concrete results during our project: - project posters (How we see our partners, Similarities and differences, Traditions and feasts ec.) - powerpoint presentations - photobook - video-document from interviews with local people - newsletters Our project will last one year and during the year we are going to organise 2 short-term joint staff training events and 2 learning, teaching and training activities (LLT activities), each school will organise one short-term joint staff training events and one learning, teaching and training activity. The short-term joint staff training events will last 4 days excluding travel, LTT activities will last 6 days excluding travel. Each short-term joint staff training event will be attended by 3 teachers and each LTT activity will be attended by 9 students + 3 teachers from each partner school.
We have seized the opportunity to run a bilateral project of school partnership between Gymnázium Karviná and Özel Adalya Anadolu Lisesi (Adalya Koleji). It was focused on the issue of similarities and differences between Czech and Turkish cultures, traditions, customs, ways of life and social inclusion. We were given an opportunity to deal with these phenomena, with intercultural dialogue, human rights issues, and to develop our common values and attitudes (tolerance, human rights, freedoms) through a number of interesting and insightful activities. We also developed key competences (communication, social, digital, creative; both of students and teachers) and helped our disadvantaged students to participate. We were happy to support intercultural dialogue between distant, yet close and – in a way – similar cultures and environments sharing a common ground. We carried out a number of local activities which mostly served as preparation for four mobility meetings – two joint staff trainings (4 days long) and two learning/teaching/training activities with students (6 days long). We have successfully conquered the challenge of developing the key competences addressed in the Application: a) communication and language – we organised workshops, discussions, lectures and other activities in international groups, so that all the participants could develop skills in English, which was the lingua franca. The Czech partner accommodated their guests with host families to initiate the competence development even further; unfortunately, the Turkish partners were not able to repay in the same way due to CoViD-19 restrictions and precautions. These skills were also developed through local activities (video shooting, narrations etc.). b) social – the participants welcomed members from different economic, geographical and social background, which allowed them to realise the issues certain groups of people might face. The project also helped us to raise awareness of the similarities between (or among) cultures, traditions, customs and religions. We addressed the problems of extremism and radicalisation, which allowed us to propose solutions. c) digital – through a number of local and international activities which required the use of digital technology. Communication through IT is natural to our younger participants, but shooting videos, editing them and adding subtitles is still a challenge to them. We were pleased to help them develop their skills through these activities. We also used technology to disseminate our project (social networks, eTwinning, webpage, school pages, newsletters etc.) d) culture awareness – the project gave us a unique opportunity to tackle the issue of cultural awareness within Europe. In our workshops, we focused on similarities and differences, traditions, celebrations, we explored the cultures on excursions, we worked out presentations about our cultures, we danced and sang together, we shared typical food etc. The project also brought results: – posters – presentations – two photobooks – videos of interviews and narrations on holidays – newsletters – collages – mind maps