The general aim of our project is to study and intervene on changing school populations as a result of immigration.
Social exclusion of young people, at schools and in the broader community, is a problem concerning many European communities and our project aims to compare the experiences of pupils in our schools and to encourage a greater level of participation, both in school and in the community.
Partner schools have been facing challenges integrating pupils from other countries into their systems and want to explore best practice from each school and find a way of better include them while learning why pupils and their families had moved to another country.
The project will stimulate debate between young people from different cultures (Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia), and so contribute to better understanding, openness and tolerance between the native inhabitants and the immigrants.
It will also aim the exchange of experience and best practices in working with immigrants in school education, leading to the promotion of democratic attitudes, equality, cultural understanding and integration.
We want our students to understand different cultures and ways of life and to fight prejudice, and while doing this we will encourage them to enhance their interpersonal abilities as well as develop their ICT and foreign language skills.
The motivation for this project comes from the reality we face in our classrooms, the fact of immigration and the challenge of a true integration. This is a complex phenomenon, as complex as the social reality in which it appears and from which it arises. This situation demands early answers, and not to maintain the old learning method of trial and error. We should anticipate to the effects, and offer innovative and creative solutions.
This project is needed to attempt to answer with our students these three basic questions: who am I? (Identity), who are you? (Multiculturalism) and where are we going? (Socio-Personal Development).
The first core, Cultural Identity, try to answer the question Who am I? from the cultural perspective of each partner. Because before we can welcome anybody we must answer this question on our identity as a people. Trying to promote a favorable relationship with our own identity as well as help those who come to our land know and integrate into our cultural reality.
The second core is the complementary vertex of our educational triangle: the encounter with the other, the different, the intercultural communication, Multiculturalism. We would like to turn our look into the cultural diversity, the wealth of values, the customs and styles of relationships that bring the rainbow of pupils from different nationalities and regions present in our classrooms, and the educational achievement of this multicultural reality to reach the goal of citizen co-existence; goal to which we are obliged not only as an educational value, but also a social demand that nowadays is a topical subject.
And finally, with the third core we work in the thematic area which the two previous ones converge: the Socio-Personal Development. After addressing the identity and multiculturalism we meet the goal of the socio-emotional growth of our students, the ability to transcend their current reality to lead them towards achieving their projects and to attract the future to the present to make it happen. This way we can make evident that it is possible to improve educationally the way of being of our students and as teachers we have the ethical requirement to do so not only by a philosophical request or certain social circumstances, but because, as it is more than proved, such socio-emotional contents are an effective tool to improve educational quality. In addition, if today there is an antidote to the great ills that afflicts our society is precisely that of a personality configured around a set of values, attitudes, adaptive attributes and socio-emotional skills that converge towards a quality of life and a personal and social happiness.