The implementation of the EU’s fundamental pillar of free movement requires continuous support at the local level, especially when the occasional waves of migration are used by certain forces to generate divisions within communities. Schools and other educational structures in formal and informal settings provide for some children their first cross-cultural encounters, and an opportunity to form positive identities. However, teachers and educators are often faced with their own biases, while the school curriculum is often overloaded with core subjects that in their majority do not deal with the underlying reasons that lead to fears, divisions and misunderstandings. Silo working is often observed with teachers and educational institutions being disconnected from parents and community-based professionals (e.g. youth workers). Restoring Respect through Music Education (RRME) aims to help address these gaps. It will bring together a strategic partnership of 7 organisations from the UK, Cyprus, Turkey, Spain, Germany and Romania to use the underlying restorative justice values of respect and power sharing, and an innovative social action music programme called "El Sistema" to develop, pilot and widely disseminate capacity building tools and knowledge that will support teachers and other educators in their efforts to enhance the resilience of their pupils when it comes to diversity and community cohesion matters. The problem of racism and xenophobia is transnational, but so is restorative justice and music. Therefore, based on this rationalization, this project takes a transnational, restorative justice approach between educational institutions, parents and NGOs to achieve Erasmus+ priorities. RRME's focus is to help deliver Erasmus+ overarching Horizontal Priority "Social Inclusion". Using the well tested "El Sistema" model founded in Venezuela in 1975, RRME will combine it with the restorative justice values of equality, social inclusion, diversity and non-discrimination to create, pilot and assess a new approach that will reduce disparities in accessing and engaging with formal and non-formal education, as well as tackle discrimination, segregation and racism in schools and other informal educational settings. This will be achieved through the creation of an innovate training programme for teachers/educationalists, which will be designed from the bottom up and with the support of a User Scrutiny Panel consisting of teachers and other professionals involved in school education. The programme will use the El Sistema and restorative justice methodologies to capacity build educators in formal and informal settings through music education with the ultimate objective of supporting them in their efforts to integrate pupils and young people who are at risk of exclusion, paying particular attention to those with migrant and refugee backgrounds. RRME's has also prepared a series of networking and dissemination actions that will establish sustainable links between organisations active in education, training, youth and music, and the society at large, including at local and regional levels. Furthermore, RRME aims to address Sectorial Priority "SCHOOL EDUCATION: Tackling early school leaving and disadvantage". To this end, RRME will focus on benefiting disadvantaged pupils' integration and attainment and thus it has selected 3 schools to join the strategic partnership combining the following expertise: Primary education provided in a rural English area, a secondary special education school in Turkey that educates students with mental disabilities, and the only art public vocational high school in Prahova county in Romania. They will work together and alongside the coordinator (UK), CSI (Cyprus), Afridat (Germany) and Caminos (Spain) who will implement the project's innovative tools in informal educational settings. Key stakeholders in these efforts will also be migrant NGOs, parents and parents' associations involving them in the piloting of the Intellectual Outputs (IOs) and the various networking actions. RRME will also address Horizontal Priority "Supporting educators, youth workers, educational leaders and support staff" as it will strengthen the professional development of educators (e.g. teachers, trainers, professors, tutors, mentors, coaches, staff in early childhood education), youth workers, educational leaders (e.g. school heads, rectors, department heads) and support staff (e.g. teaching assistants) through the Continuous Professional Development IO 1 & 2. The RRME training programme and accredited e-courses will allow them to better deal with inclusion and diversity through the use of our innovative El Sistema restorative justice social action music programme. This will help them adapt their teaching, training and youth work styles irrespective of their location. The IO2 will be translated from English to Greece, German, Spanish, Turkish and Romanian, while the website will include accesibility software.
The primary objective of RRME was to draw on the experience of teachers and educational professionals to create a program to improve the integration of children from migrant backgrounds and children at risk of exclusion from formal and informal forms of education, in particular to: - Produce an online e-course for teachers and educationalists to aid them in integrating pupils and young people through a new Restorative Justice social action music programme. - Create an e-book that encapsulates all the learnings and evidence from the program to be disseminated widely to inform educational practices internationally. Moreover, we intended to create an RRME training handbook to support the e-course teaching professionals/ volunteers in schools and informal educational settings how to support pupils and young people to become Young Music Mentors focusing on addressing social marginalisation/exclusion.
Large-scale migrations and the EU’s fundamental pillar of free movement have led to significant changes in the ethnic composition of most highly developed countries. For migrant or refugee children, school is the first place for integration. School is where they are exposed to a different culture and language, having the opportunity to form positive associations and identities. However, the school can also be a place that creates negative feelings, where children and young people question their belongingness and identity as a result of misunderstandings that lead to discriminatory behaviour. We applied to Erasmus to carry out the Restoring Respect through Music Education (RRME) Project in order to bring together a strategic partnership of seven organisations from the UK, Cyprus, Turkey, Romania, Spain, and Germany to use the underlying Restorative Justice values of respect, power sharing and non-discrimination to develop, pilot and widely disseminate capacity-building tools and knowledge that support teachers and other educators in their efforts to enhance the resilience of their pupils when it comes to diversity and community cohesion matters. RRME project took a transnational, Restorative Justice approach to support educators in their efforts to integrate pupils and young people who are at risk of exclusion, paying particular attention to those with migrant and refugee backgrounds.