UNITED WE PLAY, UNITED WE WIN: DEVELOPING SOCIAL SKILLS AND INCLUSIVE EDUCATION THROUGH SPORT AND OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES Erasmus Project

Project Title

UNITED WE PLAY, UNITED WE WIN: DEVELOPING SOCIAL SKILLS AND INCLUSIVE EDUCATION THROUGH SPORT AND OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES

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: Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Health and wellbeing; Inclusion – equity

Project Summary

As teachers and educators we set up our project with the idea that our students should live and act in a positive and confident atmosphere at school, at home and anywher else. So the way to reach this goal was to create a peaceful, relaxing and challenging atmosphere where they could strengthen, train, develop their learning abilities, education, awareness and knowledge for their future life to better support competitiveness and employment at all levels and to live a satisfying future life.
The main concept of the project named “UNITED WE PLAY, UNITED WE WIN: DEVELOPING SOCIAL SKILLS AND INCLUSIVE EDUCATION THROUGH SPORT AND OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES” was to use sports and outdoor activities as attractive and powerful interdisciplinary educational tool for achieving outcomes on several levels: a healthy and physically active lifestyle; inclusive education; knowledge and learning through innovative methods by making educational environment friendlier, more open and in line with individual needs of every single student; tolerance and respect for other people and cultures, better understanding of their own personal qualities, confidence and self-belief, perspectives for their future development as active members of the European Community. Alongside with sports and learning activities students were taught and trained to social skills – to cooperate and collaborate as part of a team for achieving a common goal, to be leaders, to communicate, express opinions, make decisions, to support weaker members of the team, to be tolerant and caring to others, to oppose negative influences and also a very important aspect: students taught and learned to and from one another.
The participants of this project were seven European countries: Bulgaria, Iceland, Italy Lithuania, Romania, Spain and Turkey. Three of the partners – Bulgaria, Iceland and Turkey hadn’t had experience in this kind of international projects. Turkish, Romanian and Lithuanian schools were located in rural areas, three partner organizations were in small towns – Iceland, Italy and Spain and the other two partner organizations were on remote islands – Iceland and Italy (Sardinia). Two partners – Bulgaria, Romania were countries with the lowest living standard in Europe.
All partner organizations of our project were state public schools with students (our target groups were students from 10 to 14 and from 10 to 16 disadvantaged students) who needed support for achieving better educational standards, personal development and perspective for future social and professional accomplishment – students with special needs and students from socio-economical disadvantaged families at risk of early school leaving.
For a better cooperation and enhancing the European dimension of our schools we promoted a larger use of English language through the ITC tools in order to facilitate the learning and teaching process during the activities in each country and in a direct, face-to-face communication during the Learning, Teaching, Training Activites (LTTA).
The project activities included several stages: preparation, research, learning, processing and exchange of knowledge and good practices, using a variety of up-to-date methodologies and approaches such as: PBL, cooperative learning, learning- by-teaching, peer and group learning, flipped classrooms, CLIL. In terms of effect, the activities fell into two large groups, a practical one, in which students experienced all kinds of traditional and new types of sports and a theoretical category which was actually a study of how this approach could change a lot of different teaching areas, from transmitting pure knowledge to altering attitudes and modeling ways of life and characters.
The desired impact of our project was spreading among people on different levels (students, teachers and other stakeholders) that everybody could concur and contribute to make educational environment friendlier, more open, accessible, exciting, stress-free, attractive, engaging and stimulating for everyone. The idea of a systemic use of learning by enjoying through using different and attractive tools was an innovative aspect to be shared in every school and everywhere.
The availability of the results, as public teaching resources, accessible for all users from the educational media also after the end of the project,are ensured by their presence on the following platforms: TwinSpace, Erasmus+ Project Results Platform, Facebook Page, Project Website, School Partners Websites, Instagram and issuu.com.
On a long term, it is also worth mentioning the on line publication of the multilingual Digital Teacher’s Guide “Sports and Outdoor Activities for a Better world”, the Intellectual Output of our project. We will gladly coach all the similar organizations that are willing to implement parts of this new teaching-learning-assessing methodolology we experimented and trained during the implementation of the project.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 199953 Eur

Project Coordinator

Istituto Comprensivo Monte Rosello Basso & Country: IT

Project Partners

• Institut Bernat el Ferrer
• Silutes r. Katyciu pagrindine mokykla
• Scoala Gimnaziala Magura
• General Secondary School “Konstantin Velichkov”
• Glerarskoli Akureyri
• Cakilli Sehit Kasim Poyraz Ortaokulu