At secondary school level, we believe that it is essential to generate a critical spirit to help them sharpen their perception and become more competent citizens. This empathetic gaze involves understanding other socio-cultural diversities and learning from them. In this respect, we wanted to establish links with other schools whose recent socio-political history was also marked by the wounds of war, displacement and family wounds: we believe that reading the past makes us more mature, responsible and empathetic citizens in order to be able to appreciate the devastating effects of any war or tyranny. This accompaniment to "read the world" involves finding out how other schools deal with this issue, through readings (understood in a broad sense) and various dialogical experiences. Finally, we wanted to observe how the emotional health of all the members of the educational community is attended to, in order to draw up a successful and, above all, real Coexistence Plan, where the needs of all are reflected.
In Vocational Training at our school we have been implementing practices abroad for many years, and we wanted to extend the internationalisation plan to secondary school and therefore reflect it in our Annual Plan; due to the socio-cultural and ethnic diversity of our school, we try to ensure that cultural collisions are not such, but rather factors that enhance and create empathy and respect, on the one hand, and critical awareness on the other. Because of these very diverse roots, we approach most of our secondary school subjects from a dialogical perspective: dialogical discussions and participation in interactive groups (with the intervention in secondary school classrooms of students from vocational training courses). However, we saw gaps between the ideal and the reality. We noticed shortcomings that we wanted to compensate for through other experiences in other centres: we wanted to share our experience of dialogue through the Erasmus Programme, as the basis for improving coexistence in the educational community; we also wanted to learn about new methodologies that help to strengthen the critical spirit and work on inclusion.