The topic of the I will survive! project is emergency and natural disaster management skills. During the years of working with high school students in regular schools, as well as with students with special needs, we have recognized their lack of knowledge and skills in coping with emergencies and situations of natural disasters, which are becoming more often because of dramatic climate changes. Through regular classes at school, students acquire only a small amount of knowledge, but not enough to know how to cope and help others in possible emergencies. Therefore, through this project, regular and special schools, in cooperation with the university, the Scout Alliance and a non-profit organization, will develop a curriculum for a new optional teaching subject “Emergency Management Skills”, teaching materials, an interactive handbook with related open educational resurces and brochures with brief instructions for dealing with possible emergencies. All materials will be available for free, adapted to students with special needs and translated into 8 languages: English, Croatian, Turkish, Slovak, Romanian, Italian, Lithuanian and Maltese. During the project, 32 teachers and educators will be trained to carry out the education through an optional subject and 24 students will receive intensive training in emergency management skills. Intensive education for students will be carried out as an inclusive education and will influence empathy of regular students, acceptance of peers with special needs and development of tolerance. As an follow up of the project we see the implementation of new curriculum of an optional teaching subject in partner schools, but also all schools and associations interested in implementing such education. Through strong dissemination activities, a long-accessible project website, and ensuring the visibility of the project, we will work to promote this idea and encourage as many institutions and individuals as possible to educate students with and without special needs for confident and correct handling in emergencies and dangerous situations.
With this project, we wanted to create a new and high-quality curriculum for an optional subject that could be easily implemented in schools, an interactive manual with links to video materials as a means of implementing the program, and teaching materials that will serve as an aid to teachers in preparing lessons. Also, the entire manual and accompanying materials are written and recorded in a simple way, adapted to be understood by students with learning difficulties. The ultimate and most important target group for us are high school students for whom the content created in this project would be useful for the prevention of injuries in situations that are not everyday, for which they are not prepared, and in which they may find themselves and which may be a threat to their life and health . Therefore, we also wanted to conduct a short evaluation with the students to see how much impact we can have on their knowledge with the materials we created in the project.
Working with students with developmental disabilities, as well as regular school students, we have noticed that they do not cope well in extraordinary dangerous situations. In order to prevent unwanted consequences, we wanted to design an optional subject that would be offered to students at school and that would help them prepare for situations they might find themselves in during their lives, which are a potential threat to their life and health. Therefore, we decided to gather partners with relevant knowledge from different fields, write a curriculum, syllabus, manual, create open educational content related to the curriculum, prepare teaching materials to help teachers in implementation, and evaluate the program with students on a short evaluation mobility.