TEARING DOWN WALLS: A WAY TO THE STANDARDIZATION OF PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES THROUGH INCLUSIVE SPORTS. Erasmus Project

Project Title

TEARING DOWN WALLS: A WAY TO THE STANDARDIZATION OF PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES THROUGH INCLUSIVE SPORTS.

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Inclusion – equity; Disabilities – special needs; Civic engagement / responsible citizenship

Project Summary

“TEARING DOWN WALLS: A WAY TO THE STANDARDIZATION OF PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES THROUGH INCLUSIVE SPORTS” is a project born from the concern of a school community committed to different (dis)abilities. Las Fuentes High School, in Villena, coordinator of this project, receives all students with physical and motor disabilities, who come from Príncipe Don Juan Manuel Primary School. Also, it believes in sport, physical education and a healthy lifestyle as key values in education.l The idea arose from the objective to unite sport and inclusion, according to the Erasmus priorities of common values, civil engagement and participation, and social inclusion.
We count on associations which support this project and with which we have counted to design this project and its activities: APADIS (Association for the Attention to Intellectual Disability of Villena and its region), AMIF (Association for People with Physical Disabilities in Villena and its region) and COCEMFE (Spanish Confederation of People with Physical and Organic Disabilities). We are very grateful to them collaborating and helping us with this project, which will help make disability and inclusive sport visible.
This project will begin on September 2020 and will end in the summer of 2022. However, it is going to go far beyond this date. We want to grow a seed to raise our students and school community awareness, today and in the future. This seed will grow so “Tearing down walls” has a real repercussion in the mid and long term. It will benefit and help the inclusion of our disabled students to come. We expect our links with COCEMFE, AMIF and APADIS to continue in the future.
Erasmus+ allows our students to discover the European reality, one we must value, respect and defend. In each school, a total of 24 students, aged 15 to 17 years old, will be working together throughout the project (8 of them will be travelling to each transnational activity, accompanied by 2 teachers).
We count on three exceptional partners. We have already worked with “Patrona” in Hungary and “Prienu Ziburio Gimnazija” in Lithuania, and the results have been so satisfactory and rewarding that we did not hesitate to ask them for their participation in this project. The ““Liceul Teologic Romano-Catolic “II. Rákóczi Ferenc” in Romania is a new school and this is going to be their first Erasmus+ project. Twinned with the Hungarian school, it accepts this challenge with great confidence. All of the three schools have links to associations related to disabilities, or collaborate in actions related to their inclusion. Also, as Las Fuentes High School, they are education centres which believe on sport and physical activity as an educational value.
Since we began writing this project, the coordinators in each country have been working in tight collaboration, to establish common work guidelines. In the transnational activities, each school will be responsible of creating a programme which will include: talks and workshops to raise awareness, given by disabled (or related) people and even by disabled sportspeople, and also practical workshops of inclusive sport. Given the characteristics of each country, we have chosen sports appropriate at each place, according to the time of year we will be visiting. Therefore, Hungary has chosen fencing and indoor sports, like handball; Lithuania, rowing and basketball; Romania, ski and ice-skating, among others; and finally, Spain will organize different inclusive sports workshops (boccia and indoor football) and to finish, the students and teachers participation in “Mar Solidaria”, an event run by COCEMFE, together with the University of Alicante, at the Sailing Club in Alicante, in which we will volunteer to help disabled people enjoy the practice of sports, such as diving, open water swimming, beach volleyball and beach football.
Together with the transnational activities, throughout the project, there will be a series of activities, for which eTwinning will have a decisive role. The results of some of these activities will be presented in the different destinations.
To sum up, we truly believe this is a quality project which has a lot to give to our communities, now and in the future.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 126454 Eur

Project Coordinator

IES LAS FUENTES & Country: ES

Project Partners

• Prienu Ziburio gimnazija
• Liceul Teologic Romano-Catolic “II. Rákóczi Ferenc”
• Patrona Hungariae Ovoda, Altalanos Iskola Gimnazium, Kollegium es Alapfoku Muveszeti Iskola