Study of Religions Against Prejudices and Stereotypes Erasmus Project

Project Title

Study of Religions Against Prejudices and Stereotypes

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 school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Ethics, religion and philosophy (incl. Inter-religious dialogue); Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

Religious and cultural diversity today more than ever constitutes a critical challenge. European countries are concerned about consequences of immigration, especially due to immigrants from Muslim countries, and about terrorist attacks linked one way or the other to religion. Stereotypes, prejudices and fear flourish. The project “Study of Religions Against Prejudices & Stereotypes” aims at contributing in significant ways to long-term educational efforts to meet the challenges and hopefully to contribute to mutual understanding and integration, as well as to counter conflicts and radicalization based upon prejudice rather than knowledge.

SORAPS aims to strengthen the professional profile of teachers by developing their social, civic and intercultural competences, fostering their knowledge and critical thinking on contemporary religious pluralism, intercultural issues management and Digital Literacy. SORAPS aims at doing so by creating three Intellectual Outputs.

The first Intellectual Output “Guidelines on prejudices and stereotypes in Religions” is agile yet accurate publication about the principal prejudices and stereotypes in the field of religious phenomena.

The second Intellectual Output “Teacher training course design” capitalizes the findings of the above-mentioned Guidelines. It consists of a course curriculum together with correlated training materials. This course is conceived to be carried out in blended modality, i.e. both face-to-face and online training.

The third Intellectual Output (IO3) is the virtual space dedicated to the training in which the various materials are organized in a coherent manner. It has been developed to be used in the free and open-source Moodle environment, but an open access, website version has also been developed.

SORAPS Project Consortium brings together different partners with complementary expertise in order to create these Outputs.

-Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia: (UNIVE, Coordinator) is well experienced in international projects management.Through the Department of Asian and North African Studies it contributes also with experts in the field of Religions and Inter-cultural Studies.

– The Ecole Pratique Des Hautes Etudes, with its European Institute of Religious Sciences (IESR), has an extensive experience in religious studies and training of teachers in these topics.

– The Universidad de Salamanca (USAL) is involved via its Research group in Interaction and eLearning (Grial) in order to provide the ICT expertise to create digital outputs.

– The staff from the Universitaet Augsburg (UAU) are researchers in didactics of history in the perspective of intercultural dialogue.

– Syddansk Universitet (SDU) with its The Study of Religions Research Unit provides distinguished scholars in Methodology of Studies of Religions and in the Study of religion-based Religious Education.

– Oxfam Italia (OIT) contributes with its experience in project concerning migrants, intercultural integration, and formal and in-formal teachers training.

– Moreover, three schools Convitto Foscarini (FOSC) Lycée René Cassin (RECA) and IES Campo Charro (ICC) have been directly involved in the partnership as hubs for the piloting SORAPS Teacher Training Course.

An innovative character of this project can be found in the fact that the Teachers Training Course aims also to equip trainees with the necessary skill to address other colleagues and inform and train them in the SORAPS topics. In fact, the 9 piloting teachers, who underwent a 7 month-long training period, organized the so-called Multiplier Training Events in which they trained 67 colleagues.

In conclusion, the three SORAPS Intellectual Outputs. which received good evaluation from the piloting teachers, are sustainable and open access tools that can be used by the single user as well by larger training institution. Being usable in both blended (face-to-face and online) and online-only modality, this scalability surely will help its exploitation by a number of stakeholders, who have been already informed by extensive dissemination activities (3,942 persons reached by Newsletter, 1,850 website users, around 2,600 persons reached through face-to-face events).

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 356757,58 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITA CA’ FOSCARI VENEZIA & Country: IT

Project Partners

• lycée René Cassin
• UNIVERSITAET AUGSBURG
• ECOLE PRATIQUE DES HAUTES ETUDES
• IES Campo Charro
• UNIVERSIDAD DE SALAMANCA
• OXFAM ITALIA ONLUS
• Convitto Foscarini Scuole Annesse Elementare Media e Liceo