We live in a highly digitalized, interconnected society, where the immediacy of human interaction make us feel very close to each other. However reflective activity is seldom practiced. We understand that communication, in the wider meaning of the word, is an inherently essential need for humanity. This is what drove us to embark on a reflective exercise on some frequently ignored forms of communication: unconventional languages. First of all, and based on a preliminary needs analysis, we determined what issues was relevant to our project and what was the priorities to be address: social inclusion, learning for life, civic engagement, deprived communities, etc. That concern for about communities in danger of social exclusion made us decide that our project would be a social project. Our objectives determined the pattern of actions and approaches to complete our project: research, student’s direct involvement, and dissemination of results and activities undertaken. With this project we have achieved tangible results (documents, blog entries, multimedia files, etc.) but especially intangible ones: greater knowledge of different cultures, improving our awareness of groups in danger of social exclusion, greater feeling of belonging to a common European culture, opening of new horizons, etc. To achieve the desired results, it was necessary to be very careful when designing specific activities for each institution, since the characteristics of the topics and the participating groups required it. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, our project was conditioned, making it necessary to postpone transnational coordination meetings and mobility activities with students. Until we were able to travel, we had to coordinate through virtual meetings. When the health situation improved, we were finally able to carry out the activities planned in each of the collaborating organizations and that were designed by the host institution: • Turin: sign language, braille and malosi • Prague: computing and digital language • Navalcarnero: Visual language • Piraeus: emotions and artistic language • London: sound and music A very important aspect for us was that we worked to create a collaborative environment among our team, for which we developed team building activities. A very important part of the project was the evaluation of the whole process, for which we focused on four aspects: specific activities of each organization, transnational meetings, mobility activities and final global evaluation. Achieving the desired impact depended on exhaustive work not only in the design of each activity, but especially in their evaluation. The impact that we hope to have occurred was structured in 5 layers: participants, organizations, students, local and regional, national and global. It is difficult to assess the actual final impact so close to the end of the project, especially in the more distant layers, but we hope to see those results in the near future. To develop this evaluation we have taken into account elements that will provide a quantitative evaluation (web interactions, blogs or social networks, number of participating students, materials created, feedback questionnaires, etc.) and qualitative (media exposure, impact, external links, etc.). To guarantee sustainability, all our activities have been widely disseminated through the Erasmus+ Dissemination Plan. Furthermore, the materials and activities developed have been shared for future use, thus fulfilling the comprehensive sustainability requirement of European projects. Finally, we consider that, despite all the difficulties encountered, there has been a smooth development of our project, successfully carrying out our planned activities, achieving the established objectives and disseminating our results with the European community in general.
Our objective was carrying out a research work on the chosen language, who communicates with it, how it has evolved, what relationship it has with other languages, in which culture or community it is used.... This objective corresponds to the theoretical part. The creation of materials, activities and dynamics to approach to its knowledge for different ages or different levels of learning, always from a practical perspective. It was also our goal to spread the language we are working on in particular, and the importance of communication in general, as a tool to develop the social aspect of the human being.
From the initial moment we decided to carry out this project, it was obvious that our participation should have a strong social character: inclusion, active aging, civic participation and access for disadvantaged groups. We consider influential to offer to the entire participating community some windows showing different realities, whatever their personal, family, age, etc. Circumstances could have. It is even more important for those who may be at risk of social exclusion. On the other hand, we believe that we live in a hyperconnected world in which communication (in its broadest sense) is becoming less relevant. Therefore, we are committed to a project that will cover different types of languages and how through them we can approach each other and develop the inherent social side of the human being.