In European societies we nowadays experience a complex situation: on the one hand we are living in multi-ethnic societies, and on the other hand there are new nationalistic tendencies. A school is a microcosm of society. We teach students from different countries of origin, refugees as well as third-generation migrants, and we are confronted with the various values that different students have taken over from their parents. At the same time schools have the chance and the obligation to educate our future citizens. We can help them to become tolerant and open-minded adults. Our project´s name is EVA, which stands for “equality, variety and acceptance”. It focusses on the idea that every human being has equal rights. Nobody should feel superior because of his or her heritage, religion, sexual orientation, or skin colour – to name only a few examples. We have equal rights, but we are not all the same! Our school (as well as our society) comprises a great variety of individuals. No-one should feel the need to hide who they are from other people. This is why we need tolerance and acceptance. We must respect each other as we are - and we must also make sure that everyone respects these values. The participants in the EVA-projects will be schools from Estonia, Portugal, Turkey, Bulgaria, France and Germany. All of these schools have experiences when it comes to teaching students from different countries of origin, minorities or refugees. In the project we will first introduce our schools and towns to each other in short films. Our various cultures will be represented by performances of traditional music and dance. In a workshop on tolerance we will discuss our different attitudes with regard to “variety”. This will finally result in a set of rules and values that we can all agree upon, and that will become the preamble to our respective school regulations. At the same time, we will be working on developing and staging a play on the topic “equality, variety and acceptance”, which will be performed on our final meeting. The preamble to the school regulations has to be approved of by students, teachers and parents alike. The performance of the play will be a public performance to which representatives of the press will be invited. Thus, our ideas will be spread in the school and the community. The long-term effects that we are aiming at, are an increased awareness and a heightened sense of tolerance that will make living together much easier – at school as well as everywhere.
In European societies we nowadays experience a complex situation: on the one hand we are living in multi-ethnic societies, and on the other hand there are new nationalistic tendencies. A school is a microcosm of society. We teach students from different countries of origin, refugees as well as third-generation migrants, and we are confronted with the various values that different students have taken over from their parents. At the same time schools have the chance and the obligation to educate our future citizens. We can help them to become tolerant and open-minded adults. Our project´s name is EVA, which stands for “equality, variety and acceptance”. It focusses on the idea that every human being has equal rights. Nobody should feel superior because of his or her heritage, religion, sexual orientation, or skin colour – to name only a few examples. We have equal rights, but we are not all the same! Our school (as well as our society) comprises a great variety of individuals. No-one should feel the need to hide who they are from other people. This is why we need tolerance and acceptance. We must respect each other as we are - and we must also make sure that everyone respects these values. The participants in the EVA-projects were schools from Estonia, Portugal, Turkey, Bulgaria, France and Germany. All of these schools have experiences when it comes to teaching students from different countries of origin, minorities or refugees.There is a large minority of Russian students in Estonia. In Portugal they have migrants from Brazil and from Africa. In Gaziantep (a big turkish town near to the Syrian border with 2.100.000 inhabitants) there are living raound abour 500.000 refugees from Syria. Bulgaria has minorities like moslems and Roma. On the island of La Réunion, France, there are living a lot of cultures together. from Asia, Africa and Europe with different religions. And last but not least in Mönchengladbach in our school we have pupils from 54 countries and a percentage of migrants between 70 and 80 percent. As different as the conditions in our schools were, the problems and their solutions were surprisingly similar. The students of all countries were not only interested in tolarating sexe, religion and colour, but also LGBTQ+ was very important for all of them. In the project we first introduced our schools and towns to each other in short films. Our various cultures were represented by performances of traditional music and dance. In serveral workshops on tolerance we discussed our different attitudes with regard to “variety”. Then we had several workshops together and seperated in our school communities to find our most important values. This finally resulted in a set of rules and values that we can all agree upon, and that became the preamble to our respective school regulations. It was much easier as we thought in the beginning to find common values for all of our schools. At the same time, we working on different examples of anti-discrimination scenes. We chose one of them that could be performed and recorded on our last meeting with actors from all countries. The open end could be finished with different endings proposed ba the audience. The preamble to the school regulations was approved by students, teachers and parents - the whole school community. Thus, our ideas were spread in the school and the community. The long-term effects that we are aiming at, are an increased awareness and a heightened sense of tolerance that will make living together much easier – at school as well as everywhere. During the project work, we first realized how important the topic of discrimination is to the students and how much they suffer if tolerance does not dominate the school atmosphere. At the same time, we became aware that the values of the school preamble are not only an imperative for the student body, but also apply to the teachers. During the working process we realized that having something like an artistic realization of the values of the preamble that accompanies them through their everyday school life will help the students to understand and identify with the preamble. We created five stickers with the main values like Accetance, Freedom, Honesty, Respect and Justice. Banners,for the entrance of the school, calenders with the preamble for the classrooms, and murals for constant presence complement the visual signs. The project is now officially over, but it will continue for a long time in our schools with the preamble and the pedagogical work to enforce their values. In the end we wrote instructions for other schools in our native languages and English as a suggestion for other schools to also deal with a value-oriented school preamble. Especially after the experiences with the corona pandemic, this can be a helpful way to reflect on important principles in the cooperation of the school community.