Between yesterday and tomorrow Erasmus Project

Project Title

Between yesterday and tomorrow

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 : Strategic Partnerships for Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills; Early School Leaving / combating failure in education

Project Summary

In this project 6 schools worked together, 5 of them finished a highly efficient and successful project. Romania is a new partner selected for the reason that they have many affected children facing the danger of social exclusion and early school leaving.

Due to the challenging circumstances all the partner schools are dealing with, all the schools have numerous learners with disadvantaged backgrounds. (Marriotts’ school and Ipsia Cattaneo: situated in urban problem zones, Zespol Szkol Elektronicznych i Ogolnoksztalcacych, Przemysl and Şcoala Gimnazială Şura Mică: situated in remote areas, Instituto de Educación Secundaria Abyla, Ceuta: situated in a peripheral region, Edinburgh college and Leksands Kommun Sammilsdalskolan: cultural differences integrating many immigrants and refugees.) During the last project (www.gfgm2012.com), the topics of resilience, good practices to face impacts of trauma in the daily school life were already identified as important for all partners. A brochure about trauma and school was written by two partner schools and disseminated among all partners. It turned out that all partners have their special knowledge, competences and sensitivity to the topic. We came along to choose “trauma and school” as the main topic to head together to new solutions and good practices dealing with afflicted and even traumatised students.

We split our project in a strategic and a teaching level. The strategic level consisted of the topic “trauma and school” and addressed teachers, heads of schools, social workers, that means experts in the pedagogical field.
On the strategic level, the title “YESTERMORROW” means that the past of our students has an impact on their future. With a present where the new knowledge how to meet with traumatised and impaired students is applied we can increase their chances for a better ‘tomorrow’. This knowledge is based on the new technology of functional brain imaging and neurobiological science. The integration of neurobiological science in the pedagogic daily life made our project highly innovative and applicable to all schools. The adaption of the brochure to new tendencies, the publishing of good practices on our project-website have disseminated our outcomes among teachers and social workers. We are convinced that it will help to reduce ESL and contribute to the development of a European Area of Skills and Qualifications.

“YESTERMORROW” on the teaching levels means including mainly the subject history (= yesterday) and the subject ICT, maths (=tomorrow) to enable our students to improve their basic and advanced skills. Integrating the gained knowledge about trauma in the didactic approach by teachers we have enhanced better skills even with weak learners. The method of project based learning and peer-learning has helped to adapt to the skills of all students and challenged good learners too. These outputs have been disseminated on Wiki platform linked to our project website and is nowadays accessible on the new website https://sites.google.com/view/yestermorrow-wikispaces/home to everyone. The teaching experiences have given us interesting inputs about the efficiency of our methodology. That means that the horizontal strategic and teaching levels were vertically linked in both directions.

We planned our activities at the TP-meetings. All partners chose a topic to improve the good atmosphere at the school, focused on creating “Safe Places” and shared their ideas with the others, the examples were added into the brochure. We translated the brochure into all the partners’ languages and published it in all countries as a paper brochure and/or published on the different school websites. Our trauma expert wrote a Picture Book which was translated into several languages by the partner schools and distributed.

In History we focused on the time from the Second World War to present time.The students interviewed time witnesses like grandparents, parents or other older relatives or older people in the nearby society. They shared the information at their own schools, through Wikispaces and at the TTL-meetings. The topics for the interviews were both about the society at that time, political issues, technological development, everyday life, how the different countries were affected by the war and how they coped and found resilience.

The longer term benefits are evident. In addition to child maltreatment which occurs in families we face a world where many people are displaced where war is threatening people within Europe which can traumatise them. Our outputs (the brochure, cases with objects, videos on youtube, collection of good practices, etc. everything translated in different languages) have helped and will help integrating children with learning difficulties, with emotional behavioural and social difficulties. The pedagogical skills of the involved teachers have been raised and the often tabooed topic “trauma” and “traumatised children” have been prioritised.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 143252,53 Eur

Project Coordinator

Leksands Kommun Sammilsdalskolan & Country: SE

Project Partners

• IPSIA CARLO CATTANEO
• Instituto de Educación Secundaria Abyla
• Edinburgh College
• Scoala Gimnaziala Sura Mica
• Zespol Szkol Elektronicznych i Ogolnoksztalcacych
• Marriotts School