We, the teachers of the school, wanted to promote acceptance of diversity, build rapport within the school community and ensure equal educational opportunities for all students. More specifically we wanted to: • understand the needs of the students from different cultural and social background, approaching them with acceptance and respect • build strong relationships of cooperation and support among students, using suitable methods of inclusion • empower our students so that they would be active citizens of tomorrow • be able to understand students’ psychological condition and recognize their feelings • enrich our methods against school bullying, xenophobia and racism, working on students’ social skills • be able to apply methods of differentiated teaching and collaborative learning • use ICT tools to motivate our students • to broaden the horizon of the school to the world through new contacts and cooperation with other European teachers • increase parents’ awareness of racism so that they would help us with our efforts to delete it
We, the teachers of the 2nd Primary School of Nafplio, realized that daily we face problems that have to do with the inclusion of socially vulnerable students, whether these are from low socioeconomic classes or Romas or immigrants or refugees. We also noticed that there was an increasing number of them in our school. We felt that what we knew was insufficient anymore and we needed to acquire innovative knowledge. There was need for new teaching materials which would be easily adaptable to the needs of each class, need for new methods and tools in order to provide our students with equal educational opportunities and need for new ways to raise empathy among students, so that everybody is accepted and respected. We believe that building rapport with students, we influence their parents positively, too. We think that we help them change their attitude towards diversity and in this way, we help build coherence in the community, in the society and therefore in Europe, too. We have always wanted a school for all children, with low early school leaving, open to the society, one that will manage effectively all modern everyday social phenomena, such as exclusion, school bullying, aggressiveness and racism. A school with happy students and happy teachers, each one of us active citizens in a coherent democratic Europe. We saw that Erasmus+ programme could cover the above needs, since it would give us the opportunity to attend relevant courses.