Die Welt ist bunt – Die Kunst zusammen zu leben. Erasmus Project

Project Title

Die Welt ist bunt – Die Kunst zusammen zu leben.

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 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Migrants’ issues; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Teaching and learning of foreign languages

Project Summary

The project “The world is colorful – The Art of living together“ wanted to answer to today’s situation in Europe. Its main objective was to raise students to persons rejecting racism, xenophobia and anti-Muslim tempers, which unfortunately was coming up in Europe. We wanted to help our students to become democratic and tolerant citizens and lead them to help others in need. We also wanted to introduce them to the today’s migrant situation and crisis and to teach them about elementaries of Christianity and Islam. Students didn´t only work with documentary movies and current media, but also had the possibility to meet representatives of various minorities, religions and with migrants. In times of upcoming neo-nationalism we wanted also let elderly people talk to our students about the dangers of Nationalism and fascism. The participants of the project were students of elementary school and their teachers, representatives of minorities and seniors. About 450 children were taking part in this project together with their teachers from 3 European schools (Austria, Germany and Czech Republic). The official language of the project was German.

Planned activities:
1. Workshop with experience – terms, such as: migration, people’s rights, racism, xenophoby, to understand them
2. Interviews based on memories of seniors about Nationalism, fascism and persecution of Jews
3. Searching for informations about migration countries in all kind of media, analysing them and differentiating between serious and false informations
4. Projection of movies about migration – fear and empathy
5. Foreigners entertain foreigners – common activities: speaking, creating, sport in Czech and German language
6. How to integrate migrants in our community? – common activities with refugee children
7. Theater show, title “Everybody is different” – musical with multicultural motive
8. The world has many forms – multicultural day for children and public
9. Schools around the world – focused on sports (schools, education and sports worldwide)
10. Workshop “Christian and Muslim holidays” – Christmas and Ramadan, similarities and differences
11. Photo contest “My multicultural friend” – children take pictures on their own
12. The world is colorful – common workshops of all three partner schools, exchange of experience. 13. Musical show “The world is colorful” (motives multiculturalism, tolerance, help people in need).

Methods:
Storytelling, active listening, directed dialogue, activating methods, working with texts, movies and mediums, demonstration, problem-solving methods, educational games, methods of discovery, project-based learning, teaching through drama, sport activities.

We reached the following goals:
Possible fears had been reduced or even eliminated, all students became more tolerant. Because of several conversations and interviews with elderly people the students got to know about the hazard of Nationalism and faschism. They learned to appreciate people indipendent from their language, origin, skincolour or religion. The students got in dialogue with people and talked about their cultures and religions.
They had been introduced into new media and technologies to get informations on their own. Afterwards the students were able to present their results and conclusions, in teams of mixed nationalities.
The students enforced and improved their skills concerning Fair-Play by playing all kind of team sports.
They learned to appreciate other cultural traditions and sometimes deep friendships between students of our partner schools came up.
They also created games or other products of the Third World.

Achieved goals of the participating teachers:
The teachers had the possibility to learn from the partner countries, how they handle with the migration situation. This enforced their opinions, sometimes they reconsider their opinions.
All teachers informed eachother about learning and teaching methods. It was a very friendly and personal exchange, it also improved the teacher´s language skills.
Teachers took part in social projects in their districts, they used several modern technologies for communication and planning the whole project.

Long-term achieved goals:
We successfully managed to eliminated fears and we gave students the possibility to see and feel multicultural diversity. We reached the main target to break up with prejudice and to gain trust in persons from all countries, when we learn about them. We gave room to tolerance and understanding in the student‘s minds. Because it´s exactly what Europe still needs.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 73050 Eur

Project Coordinator

Zakladni skola nemecko-ceskeho porozumeni a Gymnazium Thomase Manna, o.p.s. & Country: CZ

Project Partners

• Volksschule Neder – Neustift
• Europaschule am Fließ