Performing Arts and Special Needs Erasmus Project

Project Title

Performing Arts and Special Needs

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 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Inclusion – equity; Disabilities – special needs

Project Summary

We are four schools from Romania, Turkey, Spain and Italy. The first three are specific special education schools, all our students have functional diversity to a greater or lesser extent, and the Italian school is an ordinary secondary school, but with special education students integrated into the school.
Our project tries to combine three conceptions of working with the performing arts with people with functional diversity or disability. As a therapeutic tool, as an instrument of social inclusion and finally as a quality show. During these two years and a bit, the pandemic has not allowed us, due to the dynamics of our project itself, to work as much as we would have done without it. We have suffered the intermittent confinement, the stable and closed groups of coexistence, the elimination of physical contact, the masks, etc. All these characteristics have made it very difficult to finish our project with full satisfaction and have left us with the bitter aftertaste of what could have been and could not have been.
For us teachers, it is fundamental to provide our students with a way of putting within their reach a therapeutic tool that helps them to express their emotional world, their ability to communicate, their social skills, their knowledge of their own body, their personal autonomy and also allows them to acquire the necessary skills that involve movement, gesture and rhythm. This way of working with our pupils, which is new after the training we have received, has enriched our professional quality. It has allowed us to discover and work on abilities in our students that were simply ignored or attributed to their innate disabilities. Generating attitudes, emotions and behaviours that have allowed them to empower themselves and sometimes free themselves from stigmas that were wrongly assumed to be innate. Our students and professionals have worked on the activities and staging of the curriculum developed once a week. In this curriculum, we have developed four areas of work: emotional skills, movement, rhythm and body expression, social skills and communication. The four countries have participated in the development of this curriculum.
At the same time, the whole project has contributed powerfully to the formative aspect, both from the point of view of social integration and individual growth. Our project has provided them with actions and interventions aimed at facilitating and enabling the development of their personal and social skills, assuming the leading role in their own socialisation process. We have also worked on aspects of integration and inclusion that our students need so much.
And, finally, one more of our objectives, that our young people enjoy the creation of the performing arts and carry out artistic activities with no other pretension than to create spectacle. The pupils have participated with motivation and enthusiasm. We have worked with different groups during the project. Through the creation of artistic manifestations, they and we have been able to discover their creativity, their innovative contributions and their acting skills. We have carried out permanent rehearsals during the three courses in order to carry out artistic manifestations, in other areas, outside the school. Unfortunately, although we have continued to work internally, we were only able to carry them out during the first year.
In summary, it has been fundamental for the professionals to train in the performing arts, to exchange good practices and to create methodological resources in the performing arts that have improved the quality of our centres.
After detecting a deficit in our training, in our curriculum and in our practice with the performing arts as a transversal means of working with our students in different areas, we decided to carry out a project for the exchange of good performing arts practices, a means of creating curricular and methodological resources and training for our professionals. At the same time, it was an opportunity for our pupils to participate as protagonists in artistic activities that allowed them to achieve a degree of social autonomy, empowering them as creative individuals and raising their self-esteem.
Our results have been positive for our students, our professionals and our schools. We have a new curriculum to work on the performing arts, we have boosted the self-esteem and inclusion of our pupils, the centres are committed to a stable performing arts group with the pupils, we have participated in informative and formative presentations (Theatre and disability).

Project Website

http://portal.edu.gva.es/46007761/Erasmus/arts-esceniques/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 120548,8 Eur

Project Coordinator

CEE Sant Cristòfol & Country: ES

Project Partners

• Istituto di Istruzione Secondaria Superiore “E. Majorana”
• Nazilli Ozel Egitim Meslek Okulu
• CENTRUL SCOLAR PENTRU EDUCATIE INCLUZIVA “MARIA MONTESSORI”