Our project had two main objectives. The first one was to deal with xenophobia - racism and prejudice since because of our small island's position our students are cut-off the European mainland and that causes the lack of continuous contact with different European nations, their customs and traditions. Through discussions with our students we realized that they did not feel a functioning part of the EU because of the lack of contact with other EU cultures. We also noticed that they where seeing with misbelief people coming from different countries. So, it was our goal for our teachers to gain the ability to teach equality and promote inclusion through a variety of teaching methods. The second one was about the digital evolution and the importance of gaining digital teaching-learning skills in order to improve the teaching-learning process. Our goal was to learn how to use ICT for digital learning in order to make the process in class more interesting and practical for students and teachers as well as providing attractive and engaging online lessons fitting our students abilities.
A leap ahead! is a small scale project in School Education witch started in June 2022. Forum Private School is a six-graded school offering the students the recognized Certificate of the Ministry of Education as well as the chance to gain a place at the University of Cyprus and/or at universities abroad. In our school we apply in our everyday teaching the Zone of Proximal Development in English, Modern Greek and Math and we also teach Critical Thinking Skills and Emotional Intelligence once a week. The students are aged from 12-17 and most of them are Greek Cypriots. A percentage of 15%-20% are coming from mixed cultural families. Some of them come from single-parent families and others whose their parents are divorced.