We have formulated "Work for Social Inclusion" as the main objective. We want to promote the European identity, integration, inclusion and cooperation of students with different backgrounds in our schools. This should help to turn our students into committed citizens who can contribute to the cohesion of society. Therefore, this project belongs to the important area of political education and should contribute to raising awareness. So we want to convey attitudes, knowledge and skills. You have to practice social skills and then practice again and again. And for our students, a first step should be this project. We hope that the project changes something in the minds of the students, which lingers on for a long time. We try to really live the goals of our project and to try our good ideas. That's why we want to involve students from different backgrounds in learning, language and their level of functioning in this project. Our project should not be elitist, but we want to try to involve active and committed students of the age groups 15 to 18 from different social groups. We want to promote European identity, integration, inclusion and cooperation of students with different backgrounds in our schools by working with the following specific topics: Year 1: Collaboration between students from different countries to develop and strengthen a common European identity. 2nd year: Integration of people with a migrant background in different European countries. 3rd year: Inclusion of people with different disabilities in our societies and school communities. We want to develop concrete and realistic labormarket-relevant ideas for inclusion. This project will use German as the main project language and, of course, English and the national languages of the participating countries.
The particular challenge of this project was the corona pandemic, the climax of which coincided with the planned climax of our project. Instead of organizing 3 student workshops in the period from March 20 to March 21, everyone was busy maintaining basic school operations during this period. This was a major challenge in all countries. As a result, the project went very differently than planned. We are really proud that we managed to keep our project and the collaboration alive through regular TEAMS meetings of the coordinators under completely different conditions. The meetings went well technically and were interesting and useful. During the Corona period, many schools switched completely or partially to digital teaching, with different concepts and varying degrees of success. All colleagues involved in this project were happy that we were able to keep the school running in this way. But there is no question that the demands of the digital forms of teaching, which are completely new to most, have been considerable. In addition, there were challenges due to long screen times due to online lessons, financial and organizational challenges for many families to provide all their children with suitable devices. In our experience, the corona pandemic has led to fundamental and unplanned reforms in teaching in all countries. Therefore, we agreed that digital student workshops were not up to date for us for several days. We had special challenges due to different and constantly changing national and regional safety cultures regarding Corona. We had tried to live with the constantly changing different national regulations and to plan and carry out "physical" workshops, but this was only possible to a very limited extent in 2022 in the form of a small coordinator meeting and some bilateral substitute student exchanges. We're actually a courageous group, but in this case, unfortunately, there weren't any clear yardsticks for dividing courage from negligence. We were able to extend the project twice by half a year each. This gave us hope that we could still achieve some of the goals we had set ourselves. Unfortunately, an extension until the end of 2022 was not possible. We learned other things together in a completely different way than we had planned. What did we learn? Due to the corona pandemic and the subsequent war in Eastern Europe, we have been able to learn different things and values than expected: - We as coordinators and teachers involved have expanded our digital skills and got to know the possibilities and limits of digital communication. - We also understood how important it is to stay in touch, especially in times of crisis. The TEAMS meetings have helped us in many ways. On the other hand, it also became clear that digital cooperation can only supplement "physical" meetings, but not replace them. - - The pandemic has shown us how important "physical togetherness" is for everyone, but especially for children and young people. This also applies to international projects, where the children and young people are genuinely interested in other cultures and not just in the reality they see on social media or in film series. - We have newly understood how small the world actually is, how quickly a development on one continent can change everyday life all over the world, so that we all have to live in a similar situation, namely in this case with the various Corona -Restrictions. - Through our monthly TEAMS meetings, the teachers have regularly gained valuable insights into life under pandemic conditions in other European countries. Such experiences have been of great benefit to our schools and students, as we were able to get to know and convey other perspectives on the corona pandemic. - All project participants - and last but not least the students - experienced the vulnerability of human life through illness and violence and in this respect learned something important for later life. This helped us to develop more flexible forms of learning inside and outside of the project. - The project participants have also learned to appreciate the value of "being able to travel again". It also gave us a new perspective on the value of European cooperation. This project used German as the main project language and, of course, English and the national languages of the countries involved.