Together in our diversity

The main goal of this project has been to tackle the issue of social inclusion from a European, broad perspective which, no doubt, has made the outcomes more widely valid and applicable to other contexts. We have fully achieved the objective of providing an insight into the state of the matter in the four schools, in order to raise awareness among our educators and our students, and thus develop safer, more dynamic and committed learning environments. While tackling social inclusion and students at a disadvantage, our main priority, we have focused on two other major goals: a) develop competence in the English language, with a special attention to oral skills b) improve the level of digital competence. All the partner schools involved in the project have brought to the table knowledge and experience in delivering successful school to school European projects. IES Padre Feijoo is a leading school in implementing programs to care for diversity and has acted as coordinator. Our target groups have been secondary school students aged 14-17, who had the opportunity of taking active part in a multilateral project that they would otherwise have had no access to, given their particular social, economic or academic disadvantage. Such opportunity helped to broaden their minds and it increased their European sense of belonging, preventing racist, intolerant and chauvinistic behaviors. The project was based on the analysis of four main topics both through collaborative work on eTwinning platform and by means of four short-term group exchanges: 1.Migration, ethnicity, minorities 2.Abilities, disabilities, gifted students, specific programs 3.Gender diversity, stereotyped images, sexuality 4. Cultural and linguistic diversity, EU values and challenges. Apart from the exchanges, two staff training events took place to offer participating teachers some professional development on areas which were essential to guarantee the success and sustainability of the project: eTwinning and ICT. An initial assessment conducted by each of the participating schools allowed us to identify our needs and set the following goals: 1) To foster social inclusion and to prevent early school dropout among socially disadvantaged students 2) To promote social and civic, digital and intercultural competences as well as foreign language learning 3) To develop the participants' oral skills in English through virtual media and face to face meetings 4) To study from an analytical, critical perspective the issue of social inclusion in several European countries different in their social nature, as well as in language and culture, in order to find common ground among the four partners regarding the social challenges that each of us faces 5) To come up with tools and resources which will enable us to prevent, deal with and solve the problems that our societies and school communities face due to social and ethnic diversity, migration flows and socio-economic differences 6) To encourage the use of eTwinning as an instrument to develop quality projects in education All sectors of the school community have been represented in the project: students, teachers, social workers, learning support staff, families and local NGOs and agencies. This has been a student-centered project. As such, they have been involved in all stages of the program: design, development and implementation. Assessment was coordinated by a joint assessment commission. All through the development of the project we established some key stages for evaluation: a) an intermediate and a final evaluation, b) on-site assessment during all staff training events and group exchanges, c) ongoing evaluation of work on eTwinning and d) follow-up meetings by virtual media after each student mobility. Partial evaluations of results and impact conducted on a regular basis helped to make adjustments and introduce improvements as required. The outcomes of the project are available on a blog linked to the websites of the schools. We have also created a virtual guide which may be used by other schools and institutions to address social, ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity. Although it was initially a 24-month project, its length was extended till June 2022, given that the short-term student exchanges of 2020 could not take place due to the pandemic. Once the travel restrictions were lifted, the three remaining mobilities were rescheduled. However, because the outbreak of the war with Ukraine, the families of Spanish students were against their children travelling to Romania. For this reason, activity C6/C7 was carried out as a blended mobility: the Latvian students and teachers travelled to Timisoara but the Italian and Spanish teams worked online.