With the general objective of fostering social cohesion, we intended to improve the further development of our school and the internationalization of learning activities through more stimulating and innovative methodologies in the areas of language, foreign language, science, technology, visual and plastic education, music and history. That is why we wanted to encourage a minimum number of teachers to participate in a mobility training course in new resources ABP, CLIL, Gamification, English for teachers, and Theater and emotional intelligence in Iceland. After the training, these teachers committed to carry out 3 projects for the ESO and Bachillerato courses, which will be supervised by a coordination team responsible for compliance of the European Development Plan. More specific objectives of these projects or activities are, on the one hand, the improvement of digital, linguistic, learning and interpersonal skills through these new methodologies with contents that will have more to do with identity, cultures and their history, diversity and differentiation, and social skills in general. And, on the other hand, the improvement of the motivation and cohesion of students through new activities that give greater visibility of their cultural wealth, their diversity, their involvement in their learning and growth process, also to reduce school dropout.
Our INS Alexandre de Riquer institution is a secondary school in a rural area whose one of its general objectives is to improve English and ICT levels through internationalization and new methodologies that take into account the social diversity of our students. Lately we perceived signs of social segregation in youth behaviors and we saw the need to improve our educational methodology to help reduce this problem and address the diversity and integration of an increasingly multicultural student body. The immigrant population of our town is growing and we have been perceiving signs of social segregation in youth behaviors and also in methodologies that do not take into account family, emotional and motivational contexts. Therefore, we saw the need to train our teaching staff to welcome and accompany not only a student body that faces the challenges of adapting to a new community often full of prejudices, but also to understand and transform the vision of the local students who receive their classmates influenced by the fear of difference and ignorance. For this reason, our school, which has participated in other European projects and has proven its great positive impact on educational practice, decided this time to focus on teacher training.