Mental disorders are the fastest growing category of diseases health systems must cope with. During childhood and adolescence the development of cognitive, social and emotional skills goes through its crucial phases. Quality education promoting emotional, social and cognitive development of youth is recognized as the core tool for successful interventions for promotion of long term wellbeing and mental health. School is the arena where students engage with a broad range of meaningful experiences that helps them build their sense of identity, interpersonal relationships and develop emotional intelligence, resilience and self-control. Mental health and wellbeing of teachers is also of key consideration. Educators face a number of emotions when they relate to pupils, and continuous support is essential, together with professional development. Educators are required not only to teach their own curricular subjects, but also to support students whose personal, behavioral and educational difficulties may be rooted in their difficult situations (abandonment, displacement, social exclusion), social inequalities and emotional distress. It is fundamental to support educators by providing them with tools to foster the mental wellbeing of students, preventing and addressing behavioral disorders, self-destructive behaviors and long-term consequences, such as early school leaving. The ONCE UPON YOUR TIME project will develop and introduce to teachers and educators an innovative methodology aiming at enhancing students’ capacity to integrate skills, attitudes and behaviors that will help them deal effectively and ethically with daily challenges and to form positive identities.The objective is to provide tools and training opportunities for professionals and, by so doing, create educational opportunities that effectively support students’ mental health and wellbeing. The project aims at harnessing the vast educational potential of storytelling and biographical work to tailor it to the emerging needs in the formal education sector and provide a powerful and effective methodology to teachers and educational professionals. The project objectives are to: -reinforce the response of the formal education sector to current challenges and priorities; -develop training opportunities and innovative outputs to be disseminated across the formal education sector, to guarantee improved capacity and know-how of the teachers and educators; -create an innovative curriculum granting teachers and educators specific competences and methods to identify and support students’ identity formation and to address problematic behaviors and strong emotional responses; -create an innovative and inclusive educational approach promoting wellbeing and mental health of pre-adolescents and adolescent, with specific focus on students with fewer opportunities; -promote an educational approach to foster mental health through empathy, self-discovery and expression, creativity and innovation in pre-adolescents/adolescents and to support them in better understanding themselves and finding commonality with others; -promote a healthy framework at the emotional level in the classroom and educational community, creating a healthier and more effective learning environment. The main expected result is the creation of an innovative and specifically tailored educational methodology based on storytelling and biographical work to be used by teachers and educators in the formal setting, to work with students between 11 and 16 y/o, aiming at fostering their mental health and wellbeing to prevent self-destructive behaviours and early school leaving. For that purpose, the project will create 3 concrete Intellectual Outputs: IO1-THE POWER OF STORYTELLING - framework - a research on storytelling methodologies, their application in the educational setting and best practices in promotion of mental and social wellbeing of students, followed by creation of an advocacy document, aiming at promoting such methodologies in the formal setting. IO2-YOUR STORY-MANUAL - a Manual with practices and exercises based on storytelling and biographical work, tailored to the target group of pupils and students, promoting positive self-perception and mental wellbeing. IO3-YOUR STORY-Pedagogical Curriculum - an educational model tailored to 2 target groups of students at the age 11-13 and 14-16, providing teachers and educators with a well structured path to be implemented in a class. A series of activities is foreseen to facilitate the achievement of set of objectives: - 4 TPMs to facilitate the cooperation and bridge the work of different outputs - 1 Joint Staff Training to transfer the knowledge developed in the project to the professionals in the formal education setting - 2 rounds of MEs to disseminate the project results - recording of “Impact Stories” video with the testimonies of teachers and students participating in the activities, to promote the impact of the developed methodology
The project aims to use personal biography to understand the processes that make our life meaningful, whatever the circumstance lived. Creating the story of their lives through the Once Upon Your Time intervention allows the child or young person to make the transition from one stage to another having understood the previous ones and being able to enter the next one with the force of the processes well closed. By doing so, young people with fewer opportunities or at risk of social exclusion and early school dropout can better understand their position and recognize within themselves the resources that the unfavorable circumstances, which they want to overcome, have helped to develop - creating an attitude where the problem is viewed as part of the solution. The partnership wanted to bring this approach close to educators so that they will be able to assist young people in strengthening their resilience in facing unfavorable circumstance in their lives, while at the same time fostering that same quality in teachers.
The ONCE UPON YOUR TIME is an international project for youth development funded by Erasmus+ involving four organizations: Youth Reach Centers of Reykjavik (Iceland); The Surefoot Effect (Scotland); Institute for Research and Training in Education (Slovenia); YOMN network (Spain). We applied for this project because all partners, in diverse ways, work to support young people in their countries that are in a vulnerable situation of suffering problems of socialization and consequential isolation, often lacking nurturing resources and cultural means for a functional life, which may have a negative impact on their mental health and performance in school, in many cases even leading to early school dropout. The ONCE UPON YOUR TIME project's partnership applied for the project in order to provide an innovative professional development opportunity for teachers in supporting their students’ and pupils’ mental health and identity formation process through storytelling-based methodologies and biographical work. The project focuses especially on young pupils and students with fewer opportunities or at risk of social exclusion and early school dropout.