Multiculturality, diversity, integration - equal opportunities for everyone

"Multiculturality, diversity, integration - equal opportunities for everyone" – these are the most important challenges for today’s Europe. In a more and more diverse and multicultural society people face with a dual situation: to be able for a deeply integration or to preserve their cultural/ethnic identity. Partners were Romania, Turkey, Germany, Italy, Estonia, Republic of North Macedonia. The problems we focused were: difficulties to integrate students of minorities, refugees, with different backgrounds in every day school life; lack of competences and important skills for most of students from a risk situation – communication or intercultural skills, lack of self-confidence and support, problems of identity, the gap between majority and minorities students – they were not eager to better know the traditions or cultural values of the others; discrimination or marginalization of minorities, refugees or migrants; difficulties to learn the languages in their new countries (Italy, Germany, Turkey) or the language of majority (in Romania) This project helped our students to come closer to different cultures and got familiar to different traditions and different ways of life. The objectives were: Promoting of equal right to education for 40% of our students Increase the motivation for learning among students from vulnerable groups for the next years Foster the integration process of people with different backgrounds in a multicultural area Create links between all kind of students in our schools and facilitate everyone access to reciprocal knowledge through common activities Improve skills and competences such as critical thinking, communication, creativity and team working for better scores in education Promoting the innovative teaching methods and strategies to develop intercultural competences Through this project we would like to encourage students to have a look into partners’ classrooms and culture to become open minded citizens, by promoting democratic values The target groups: students of 15 to 18 years old, teachers, parents, local stakeholders. Students were from: ethnic minorities -Hungarians in Romania, migrants in Germany and Italy, different minorities in Estonia, Macedonia, refugees from Syria in Turkey, or from disadvantages backgrounds In this project took part pupils from 6 countries of Europe. There have been involved groups such as teachers and school staff–headmaster and deputy headmaster, parents, local authorities. We involved: - students from different backgrounds or in risk situation – from economical, social, cultural, points of view -students from ethnic minorities in each country, because we will like to show how they are integrated in school communities and how they contribute to the cultural diversity - students from refugees/migrants families - students with communication, social and creativity skills and competences. Romania involved students from ethnic minorities such as Hungarians Turkey-students from rural areas who faced cultural, ethnic, social, economical and educational challenges and also migrants/refugees from war zones Macedonia - most of students were Macedonian, but there were also few from other nationalities, Rroma,Turkish, too. We had students from different social levels, almost one third traveled every day from rural places to school Germany and Italy –had a great number of students from migrants/refugees families with different cultural backgrounds Estonia-students belonged of rural area or of disadvantages families 1st meeting-Getting to know each other better Here we organized and planned all the mobilities and activities - The tasks were set up for partners Was set up of a Twinnspace Was created and exchanged the personality profiles Students and teachers uploaded their profile on Twinnspace It was create the logo for the project 2nd meeting Multiculturalism and democratic values - tolerance, non- discrimination Street survey about the relationship between people in our community It was create a questionnaire It took place a contest – poster about stereotypes and prejudices in our community Students created video /short movie – “What it means to be a minority” It was create a web page as part of a final blog open to other communities 3rd meeting Democratic values in today’s Europe From European to local level - The rights of minorities/disadvantages All equals – all different good practices of integration in each school Discrimination in our school – students took interviews with students from different backgrounds 4th meeting Helping students to develop a sense of identity An album History of my family–It was collected pictures/stories–telling stories Students played in Theater forum - Multiple layers of identity 5th meeting From tradition to modernity There were included the migrants/minorities/risk situation students in the school activities -making videos There were presented ‘’Folk songs and traditions ‘’form each partner countries.