"Don't let them get lost" is a School Exchange Partnership Project to be carried out under Key action 2, ka229, of erasmus+ Programme. The Project consists of 6 different partners from 5 different programme countries. The partner schools from Italy, Serbia, Romania, Portugal and Turkey all have immigrant and refugee students in a high number and also have great experience in different parts of the field. The aim of the Project is to manage the true Integration of Immigrant and Refugee students into the society and culture they are in. Thanks to the results of survey monkeys and our experience, we have seen that Integration of Immigrant and Refugee students in a true way is very important for the future of the whole community because almost each of those students has a trauma, disadvantged condition behind. According to the statistics; - Local immigrants mainly move to another city for economic or social obstacles they have - Immıgrant and Refugee students mostly have lost members of their families - Nearly half of those students have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - More than half have exposed to violence from inside or outside the family Also, governmental statistics Show us that the possibility of those students' being involved in illegal matters or commit crimes are more likely than others. If the children having those disadvantaged conditions cannot be integrated into society or school environment, it means that the whole school system and the future of whole community will be affected in a negative way soon or later. That some problems are happen to more has been stated by the parents Whose children get education in the same environment with those students. Growing children as unhappy, aimless, unsupervised and insecure adults in this environment is the main starting point for us. These children will become adults of the future, but are not included in their future common denominator if they are not properly integrated. Another key factor is that, although the partner schools are experienced in the field. They always meet new situations because the situation is not a rule of science and very variable. That's why we need to Exchange of good practices and meet with new applcaitions and situations to integrate those students. To summarize, we learn together with our students in a multicultural environment despite different levels of preparation. In this process, we realize the need to redefine our needs every day. Since we think our personal skills are not enough to adapt to this new situation, we want to realize this project. We believe that the change in attitude to be gained from the project activities will have a positive impact on our education environment in the short term, our environmental schools in the long term, the environment in which our school is located, and the entire society over time. The participants for the activities will be selected very carefully in order to gain as much as possbile from the Project outcomes. Diseemination will be very important during adn fater the execution of the Project. An etwinning Project with the same title will be carried as paralel to this Project ( https://live.etwinning.net/projects/project/220010). Twinspace of the Project will be used as an open-source material for any interested teacher. The communication, online meetings, discussions and some of presentations will be done through Twinspace. Other school staff also will follow and contribute to the Project acts thorugh Twinspace. While selecting partners, we paid attention to gather schools having experience in dealing with immigrant and refugee students. Also, all schools in this project have same age level of students. Thus, we have thought that we can find better solutions to our common goals. The main activities of the Project will be LTTAs. We will have 6 different LTTAs in each partner country as Short Term Joint Staff Training. In each LTTA, all partners will work on the same theme. The effectiveness of the LTTAs will be the most important factor for the success of the Project. So, the preparation before the LTTA, the organisation and collaborative working during the LTTA and sustainability and dissemiantion activities after the LTTAs will be very important during the execution of the Project. To support our main LTTAs, we will have local, virtual and dissemination activities. Reaching as many people as possible is one of the mian goals of partners. To manage this, we will have Informative and Dissemination meetings / visits with parents, other school staff, nearby schools and local authorities. With the change of attitude we aim to provide thnaks to this project, we expect the results of improving school peace, increasing academic success and disseminating psycho-social positive developments in immigrant students. We aim to create a culture of cooperation in all of our parents, in our close institutions and in our local community, to adopt empathy, to adopt the other instead of othering.
DESCRIPTION DLTGL (Don’t Let Them Get Lost) is an International project that was carried out under the key Action 2 (School Exchange Partnerships) of Erasmus+ program. DLTGL, consisting of 6 partners schools from Italy (the leading partner), Turkey (Ankara and Antalya), Portugal, Serbia and Romania, aimed to integrate immigrant and refugee students. We decided to carry out DLTGL because in partner schools and countries as in all around Europe, immigration is a popular topic. The primary responsibility of immigrants or refugees is to adapt to the society and culture they live in, without leaving their own culture. The task of the migrated country or city and the people in those places is to prepare a correct and healthy infrastructure for integration. Considering that education is the most important factor that accelerates the integration of immigrant / refugee students, the importance of the development of the staff in our institutions can be easily understood. The role of Common Values of Europe in solving and treating those problems.Thanks to our project, we aimed to implement the integration in the fast and correct way by adapting the correct and good practices to obtain through exchanges with our partners to our own institutions. The EU commission recommended that schools and institutions cooperate with each other and exchange good examples and as all partners in this Project had a great number of immigrant and refugee students we tried to reach this goal by sharing our experiences with each other. The main actors of our project activities have been the teachers at the partner schools of the Project. In order to exchange information in more education areas, it was decided that 4 teachers from each partner institution should have participated in LTT activities. Some problems related to Covid obliged the partners to do mobilities in only 12 monthes and Italy couldn’t partecipate to the mobility in Serbia in order to a lot of teachers were effects of Covid. Anyway we had many virtual meet to share and exchange the practises in our LTT activities.The participants that have taken part in the activities they have had a key role in reaching our project goals, moreover all teachers participating in LTT activities, have applied their achievements in classroom settings and shared them on Twinsapce before (the platform has not worked for a long time and we still have problems to upload materials) and other virtual platforms after. Students have taken an active role in LTT activities and sample applications that have been implemented later, local / virtual activities and evaluation of the activities. Their thoughts and feedback have been a very valuable criteria. They have been included in the project with the activities such as survey, research, interview etc. Parents, Local Media and Local Authorities have been involved by dissemination visits, workshops, meetings. During DGTL, students have created digital materials, videos, performed show, made competitions, etc.. Thanks to the Project, they have learnt; - what a migration is, - about the current practices in all Europe - the history of migration and the differences between refugees, asylum seeker, forced migration etc.. - about the thoughts of immigrant/refugee students, - the importance of Values They have practised/improved their ICT and language skills. Improving participants' ICT usage skills was other key points of DLTGL that participants have used and learnt how to use ICT in a true way by creating too many materials digitally like presentations, recorded videos, interviews, etc. Also, representing their country and schools have made them gain self-confidence, be active citizens. The target group of DLTGL were the students aged between 10-14 but also primary school students had an important role in the school partners where was possible. While implementing our project, as our methodology, we mostly used searching, observing, recording, demonstrating, acting out and lots of different assessment tools. Good communication, good cooperation, planning and a strong sound management became the key factors that led us to reach success. Now, we hope to have more knowledge - to deal with discipline matters related to Immigrant and refugee students, - to create a positive atmosphere firstly and environment in the classroom, - to create a better, more tolerable, more generous, more peaceful society, - to help to overcome barriers and recognize and respect the important contribution of migrants, To achieve those short and long term objectives, the Project used the social, local and national media, online platforms such as eTwinning, Blog, Google drive, school webpages and gave much importance to dissemination and sustainability activities. To sum up, DLTGL is a project aiming at helping to better coordinate effort to meet the needs of migrated students, to transmit intercultural values and create new generations where Emphaty, Tolerance, Respect, Cooperation, Helpfullness are the values to leave in a peaceful society.