Integration may be a great idea nowadays experienced by everyone Erasmus Project

Project Title

Integration may be a great idea nowadays experienced by everyone

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: Migrants’ issues; Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

We often feel a sense of uneasiness when we meet someone different from ourselves. This may be a normal reaction at the very beginning of a relationship but may bring to prejudice and violence in the long term in a multicultural and multiracial society as our own. And this is what Education should absolutely avoid. It is a very hard job because it is not just a matter of language but, most of all, it is a question of traditions and habits, in other words, a question of trying to accept a different mentality, get along with it or, better, make the most of it.

Istituto Bertacchi has 12, 5% of students with migrant background, out of which a 90% attend the vocational school with focus on sanitary and social services and the VET with focus on tourism and sport trainers. In the first two years we have a percentage of failures equal to 12% and out of this 85% of the failed students come from a non-European country. The school in Cyprus has 55% of foreign students. The school in Spain has 9,5% of students with migrant background, among which most are taking Compulsory Secondary Education (11,8%) or Vocational Training (10%); and only a percentage of 4% take Non Compulsory Secondary Education. All the partner schools in the project have different situations but the same need to share their best practices of integration and find the better ones in order to promote the real integration.

The idea of this project is to share best practices of integration and to involve both migrant and native students (aged 15 to 19) to collaborate in curricular lessons to achieve integration and to promote new activities to be carried out jointly, but also teachers, families, local authorities and press and local migrant associations.

The objectives of the project are the following:
1) boosting integration and interculturalism: to share best practices of integration, which was proposed in the mobilities by each school.
2) enhancing critical thinking and social skills: to raise our students’ awareness and responsibility over their actions and opinions.
3) developing digital competencies: to develop and increase the knowledge, access and use of digital technologies among students and teachers.
4) enhancing motivation among students: the use of ITC competences, extracurricular activities and mobilities support the school in engaging and attract more the students, especially those from a migrant background who might face extra challenges in the process of growing up and Learning, and as a result tackling the Early School Leaving.
5) promoting social inclusion at school, involving students, families and local community.
6) increase the international dimension of the school and its network and cooperation thanks to interconnection created by an Erasmus project.
7) increasing language competencies of teachers and students involved in the project activities.

In order to reach the project’s objectives, we have organized different activities:
-communication activities: logo, dissemination material, Facebook page, E-Twinning platform, Blog project.
-production of the students: survey and collected results, comics, photomontage, inclusion dishes, videos, interviews, multilingual song, a final (online, due to the pandemic) concert.
-sharing of best practices during the mobilities: Welcoming Centers, ECDL courses and celebration of the International Day of Migration.

With this project we expected that the students felt better integrated and established friendships with their classmates and also with the students from the other participant schools, and this was satisfied. We also expected and reached:
-an increase of the number of migrants attending extra-curricular activities and school trips and the number of migrant students that continued to participate in extracurricular activities;
-more activities with digital tools integrated in the classrooms;
-a percentage of reduction of the early school leaving;
– an increase of the international dimension of the school and its network and cooperation and of the number of new projects proposed and activated in the following years;
-an improvement of the performance in languages courses through EU language certifications.

All the activities contributed in the development of each school in long-term. In fact, all the participant schools continued to organize and use all the results and the best practices of integration proposed after each mobility, such as the Welcoming Centers, the celebration of the International day of Migration and ECDL courses in English for migrants, so that every student can take benefit from this international experience. All the participants also continued to organize extracurricular activities and involve more and more foreign students. All the best practices and results effectively became permanent in each school and are available to everyone.

Project Website

https://twinspace.etwinning.net/74636/home

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 88713,65 Eur

Project Coordinator

Istituto Statale d’Istruzione Superiore G. Bertacchi & Country: IT

Project Partners

• INSTITUTO DE EDUCACIÓN SECUNDARIA RAMÓN ARCAS MECA
• Lykeio A Ethnarchi Makariou III Pafou