We had three big objectives. Firstly, we intended to acquire strategies that help us to enable a wider understanding of each other and among the students from different backgrounds, especially between the "regular" German classes and the bilingual Polish classes. Furthermore, we aimed at developing a concept to better integrate our refugee classes in daily school life and provide educators with appropriate skills. And finally, we wanted to expand our position as a "Schule ohne Rassismus-Schule mit Courage", as a member of a German-wide network of schools who speak up against racism.
Robert-Jungk-Oberschule is one of Berlin's European schools with Polish as a partner language. In addition to this, we are a member of the German-wide network for "Schools against racism". We understand our school as a place for everybody where we teach our students to become open-minded, democratic and resilient citizens. On the other hand, we still see some problems in our day to day teaching habits when facing cultural, linguistic or social heterogeneity. Consequently, our main goal was to find strategies and methods to overcome these barriers, as teachers but also as individuals, to pass on this new knowledge to other colleagues and our students. We regarded the participation in European courses as highly helpful to learn and understand intercultural competences better. With studying in our work and free time in a different country, we also want to set an example for what Europe and programs like Erasmus+ have to offer to everyone and what it means to further develop competences even if you are not a student at school anymore. For us, Erasmus+ is a realistic setting in which to practice interculturality and, at the same time, learn more about it.