Context/background of project There has been a worrying rise in racism and other forms of intolerance over the past decade in EU countries and beyond. These more recent developments have compounded many other well established forms of inequity. The outcome of this has been the increasing popularity of the political right, especially that of the extreme right. The increasingly unchecked ‘escalator’ approach whereby extreme, often unchecked views, can lead to either support for terrorism or direct action means that many people are treated with intolerance and are subjected to many forms of victimisation and marginalisation. Overcoming negative beliefs about others is not just a matter of legislation but of developing perspectives and attitudes that promote a sense of ‘shared humanity’. This means focusing on what we have in common rather than what divides us and having empathy towards those experiencing challenging circumstances. As children grow their views become more established. Once discriminatory attitudes become embedded they are hard to shake or change. Therefore, how young people perceive others and the culture of a future society needs to be addressed in school. Increasing tolerance and reducing discrimination requires deliberative action on the part of education in very specific ways. Schools are sometimes ill equipped to take on many of the ideas and conversations that are required to educate young people into a concept of society that is build more firmly on democracy, diversity and equity. In many cases there is a lack of in-depth knowledge and understanding among teachers about these ideas and a lack of opportunity for leaders and teachers in schools to engage in a process of enhancing knowledge and understanding of these areas. There are also limited opportunities to engage in in-depth robust deliberation on these type of bigger issue conversations and ideas. Objectives This project aims to provide 1. Action Learning Sets for use by school leaders with school staff to enhance educators knowledge and understanding of three core themes- i.e. democracy, diversity and equity 2. To develop cross curricular toolkits in order to take the enhanced knowledge and understanding among staff into the development of student learning in identified curricular areas 3. To provide a safe and bounded context where discussions and deliberations can take place firstly among school educators and more laterally among students themselves with view to enriching the quality of discourse, understanding, knowledge, empathy and action. Numbers and Profile of Partners The project involves 4 university lead partners, four school lead partners, 12 additional associated partners schools and four professional development organisations. The second phase will extend the project to at least 5 teachers in each of the 16 schools and this should engage in the region of 600 learners. It is hoped that both sets of resources will be used more extensively in future as a result of the integration of the resources into leadership development programmes in each of the participating countries. Activities and Methodology There are different project activities 1. Assembling and collating the action learning sets and the protocols for their use in staff development activities - this is the first phase that will focuses on school leaders and school educator teams 2. The training of all associated partner schools in the use of the Action Learning Sets. 3. The development of cross curricular classroom toolkits to extend staff learning into the classroom and to ensure that student learning is impacted strongly by the enhanced of school staff on these areas of democracy, diversity and equity. This will involve all partners in the identification of cognate curricular areas to be developed and in the production of classroom ready resources and methodologies to explicate these themes in classroom practice. Impact There will be an impact on the direct target groups: school leaders, teachers and learners in upper primary and lower secondary schools, university education departments and leadership development organisations, and on indirect target groups other leaders, teachers, learners and other school support initiatives. The action learning sets and the classroom toolkits will provide creative training and teaching documentation with methods instructional models that will lead to more student centered approaches to engaging with difficult and challenging concepts and ideas, strengthening the professional profile of the teaching profession; offer a transnational experience to teachers and leaders in the partner schools and extend the reach of these outcomes by developing a web platform for the material and ideas so that the project team may share their experiences with other cognate groups across Europe.
1. Encourage leaders and teachers in project schools to develop critical perspectives, ask questions, be innovative and creative and make a contribution to school improvement by supporting the development of action learning sets in schools to explore and address school-identified issues. 2. Support and encourage the professionalism and engagement of school leaders and teachers with each of the three topics in order to enhance and enrich professional knowledge and understanding 3. Ensuring that the outcome of the project is translated into modes of engagement between leaders, teachers and students that are more democratic and more aligned to the type of needs many students have to make sense of their social worlds. All students are embedded in very complex social worlds, 4. Support schools in making more explicit attempts at including the complexity of the social world of children and young people in the education of students. Many students require additional support and consequently, this project will seek to find ways of enhancing student engagement so that all students are included as meaningful participants in the schools' activities on this project.
The project team identified that there was a need to support school leaders and teachers in the first instance in the manner in which the discourse relating to democracy, equity and diversity are explored in schools. The need to develop a way of developing leaders' and teachers' own understanding of these concepts was identified as an essential first step. With this in mind, the project team co-constructed a series of Action Learning Sets to address this objective. In order to ensure that this enhanced knowledge impacted student learning a series of cross-curricular units that dealt with each of the topics were co-constructed by the school partners and the university partners. These units of work were targeted at all second-level students from 12 - 18. The intention of the project was to extend this work to other schools including some primary by organising training events that would align with both phases of the project i.e. action learning sets with teachers and leaders and cross-curricular units to enhance student learning. These latter objectives were not achieved as COVID-related issues impacted the project milestones significantly. This extension work will be developed in a number of planned post-project activities.