"STOP FENCES" (Students Teachers Organizing Projects: Freedom, Equality, Newcomers, Compromise, Employment, Solidarity) project comes from the necessity of our students to stop building fences in their growth as human beings. We want them to feel that they are part of a community, united by a common identity, culture and shared values. An inclusive society is based on mutual respect, solidarity, self-acceptance, equal opportunities and decent living standards for all, where diversity is seen as a source of strength and not as a divider. In our teaching practice, we have seen how students socially excluded are not motivated and abandon their studies before getting a diploma in secondary education. Thus, we think that we can provide valid solutions to these issues in an imaginative and innovative way. All school partners of this team have had experiences in the past with other European projects and the coordinator school is willing to direct a project with such social impact. The main motivation for our project is to improve and complement each partner's experience on working on social inclusion, reducing the early school drop-out rate, and reviewing the "Welcoming Plan" in order to promote the integration of new members of the educational community. Priority will be given to develop the autonomy of students. We want our students to become motivated active leading characters in our schools. To get this, we have, among others, the following objectives: - Promote the exchange of cultural realities through workshops and activities that show the diversity that coexist in our educational center, with the aim of including immigrant students from other countries. - Reduction of conflicts through the improvement of coexistence. - Strengthen the integration of students with special needs. - Training the teaching staff in new methodological strategies. - To improve the students' self-esteem. - To unify the different individual projects of the center and work collaboratively so that, the Erasmus project is the great link and the channel to use to work in an interdisciplinary way. - To learn from the similarities with our European partner centers and enrich ourselves of our differences. - To know and share our own European cultural heritage. -Improve linguistic competence both in our language and in foreign languages. - Integrate disabled students. This partnership is formed by 5 secondary schools from Italy, Greece, Brussels and Spain and students involved in the project are aged from 12 to 18 years old. With this representation, we reach a wide range of European diversities, in which we will achieve one of our aims: to develop and enhance a European dimension to our curricula. We all share a common wish to collaborate and work hard for our objectives. To one extend or another, we all are familiar in working in different projects with students. The activities have been designed in order to motivate students, to raise their self-esteem by traveling abroad and share new experiences and to improve their oral and personal skills. They will carry out different activities in the visits, show results and products, evaluate the impact of the project, participate in different workshops and discussion boards about the different topics designed for the project and put other's experience into practice. We would like that the results of this project could have a positive impact on various leves: firstly, on our schools, where we want levels of school drop-out to descend, by means of integrating all students in this project. Also on a local level, the schools that are situated in our district can benefit from the direct contact of our students and also from the materials we want to develop. On national and international levels, we would like to be known in other forums about education thanks to the promotion of the results of our efforts, publication of materials and articles where we will show the positive aspects of this collaboration among different schools from distant countries, which can bring upon a feeling of belonging to a common European identity. This is a project for the future. All experiences and results that we are going to carry out will let us go forward in our essential goals making students actors in the our schools daily life, either in their learning process, mediation, organization of activities or full responsibility of their actions, reinforcing their role as social beings in a democratic and supportive society. Therefore, what we are going to develop in this project will be valid once the last activity of the program is over. Thanks to this European funded gent, we will see that with our efforts we have turned our schools into better, socially inclusive places to work, to study an to live.
"STOP FENCES" (Students Teachers Organizing Projects: Freedom, Equality, Newcomers, Compromise, Employment, Solidarity) project came from the reality of our students in order to provide them tools to stop building fences in their growth as human beings. We wanted them to feel that they are part of a community, united by a common identity, culture and shared values. An Inclusive society is based on mutual respect, solidarity, self-acceptance, equal opportunities and decent living standards for all, where diversity is seen as a source of strength and not as a divider. In our teaching practice, we often see how students are socially excluded, they are not motivated and abandon their studies before getting a diploma in Secondary Education. Thus, with this project we have provided valid solutions to these issues in an imaginative and innovative way. The past experiences of the partners with other European projects have helped the coordinator school to direct a project with such positive social impact. We have developed and improved each partner's experience on working on social inclusion, reduced the daily coexistence conflicts and created the "The Buddy Project" document in order to promote the integration of new members into the educational community. We wanted our students to become motivated active leading characters in our schools. To get this, we have fulfilled the following objectives: - We have promoted the exchange of cultural realities through workshops and activities that showed the diversity and similarities that coexist in our countries. - We have reduced the number of daily conflicts with the creation of the "buddy" figure. - We have given equal opportunities to different profiles of students (age, race, low economic situation,...) - We have trained the teaching staff in new methodological strategies. - We have improved the students' self-esteem, communicative competence and personal growth. - The Erasmus project has been the great link and the channel among all individual projects inside the school in order to work in an interdisciplinary way. - We have learned from the similarities with our European partner schools and enriched ourselves of our differences. - All participants got to know and share a European identity. -We have known, learned and enriched ourselves so much from other institutions that, some of the schools involved in this project, got the experience enough to get the accreditation in Erasmus+. - The image of the schools has been national and transnational strengthen. - We have created the “Communication Plan” in order to promote and give appropriate recognition of the work developed inside the school. This partnership was formed by 5 secondary schools from Italy, Greece, Belgium and Spain and students involved in the project are aged from 12 to 18 years old. With this representation, we reached a wide range of European diversities and even similarities, in which we achieved one of our aims: to develop and enhance a European dimension to our school and to our curricula. The activities (before and after each mobility) have been designed in order to motivate students, to raise their self-esteem by traveling abroad and share new experiences and to improve their oral and personal skills. They have carried out different activities during the visits, showed results and products, evaluated the impact of the project, participated in different workshops and discussion boards about the different topics designed for the project and put other's experience into practice. The positive results of this project are countless. Firstly, on our schools, where we wanted to integrate all students in this project and to give families another chance to participate in the daily life of the school. Also on a local level, the schools that are situated in our district could benefit from the direct contact of our students and also from the materials we developed. Moreover, the relationship between the Official Language School, the Town Hall, The European Programme Office from the Government, The Teacher’s Centre and some other institutions has grown. On national and international levels, our schools are now known in other forums about education thanks to the promotion of the results of our efforts, publication of materials and articles where we have shown the positive aspects of this collaboration among different schools from distant countries. This was a project designed for the future. All experiences and results that were carried out will let us go forward in our essential goals, making students active participants in the daily life, either in their learning process, mediation, organization of activities or full responsibility of their actions, reinforcing their role as social beings in a democratic and supportive society. Thanks to this European programe, we can affirm that with our efforts, we have turned our participants and our schools into better and socially inclusive figures.