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EDUrope: Education for Diversity in Europe
Start date: Jun 1, 2014, End date: May 31, 2015 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Sagrada Familia de Urgel is a bilingual charter school located in a working class district in Madrid (Spain). It is intended for students between the ages of 3 and 18 years old. Our aim is to provide them with a comprehensive education and ensure equal opportunities for every student, and as well promoting social integration. EDUrope: Education for Diversity in Europe is the name of the mobility project we have developed. We already had a basic training in methodological innovations such as cooperative learning, inclusiveness and project based learning but we needed new approaches to deal with diversity and to engage students in their learning. The main objectives we wanted to achieve with this project are: - Reducing the dropout rate and school failure. - Improving equal opportunities, allowing access to all students particularly: low-income families, long-term unemployed families, and immigrants or refugees with linguistic and cultural difficulties. - Acquiring new strategies and engaging resources to educate our students, especially those with learning disadvantages, those who leave the school system prematurely and young people with poor school performance. - Promoting educational innovation in the classroom, teacher training and curricular flexibility. HOW THE PROJECT WAS CARRIED OUT We chose to visit two institutions: Ressu Comprehensive School (Finland), a well known reference regarding educational innovation and support for special needs students, and Västerås Citygymnasiet, the first UN school in Sweden, with a full array of inclusive responses to cultural diversity. Prior to the mobility, we designed logging tools with the hosting institutions, scheduled the job-shadowing week and signed the learning agreements. During the mobility, three teachers stayed in each hosting school for 3 weeks. In our proposal we stated a training phase for the first fifteen days devoted to interviews, seminars and training about the host country's educational system, its framework and their answer to diversity, followed by a job-shadowing phase in the host school that would last a week. Actually, we were able to combine those activities since the first day both in Finland and Sweden, job-shadowing for the whole three weeks period whereas it was compatible with our training and the interviews we carried out. In addition to this, we had the opportunity to get a deep knowledge of other institutions and we even participated in their daily activity. These institutions provided a wider vision of the education in both countries. BENEFITS OF THE PROGRAMME AND POST PROJECT EXPECTATIONS European awareness is a benefit as a result of the exchange of different educational and social perspectives. Cohabitation itself during those weeks and later the visit of a Finnish group of pupils or the responsible for the School Libraries System in the city of Västerås have enforced greatly this enrichment. Participants' achievements were tracked with the tool logs designed prior to the mobility, which assessed the information gathered in each training experience. Achievement indicators were materialized in the Europass, which was reviewed by the tutor of the hosting institution. Participants tweets and web documents are being published on Sagrada Familia de Urgel official website, free and accessible in digital format to everybody on the net and they already enrich Sagrada Familia de Urgel Training Programme. The dissemination of the project began on June 30th, 2014, for all the teacher staff of our school and went on throughout the whole school year thanks to Twitter, Facebook, our website, parents' meetings, our school magazine... Our conclusions have been shared with all our teacher staff, our educational community, the Board members of all "Sagrada Familia de Urgel” centres as well as with other external institutions: other Madrid teachers and headmasters, Educational Inspection -official body that enforces and helps with the application of educational rules in Madrid-, AESECE -association that comprises all charter upper high school institutions in Spain, with more than 150.000 pupils-, members of the Education Board in Madrid and the Spanish Education Ministry, FERE -association of all Catholic Schools in Spain, with more than 220.000 pupils and 340 centres... Our pupils will benefit the most because the project implementation will affect, and is already affecting, our teaching methodology and their learning process: new asessment tools (rubrics), greater authonomy, greater involvement in their own learning process and assessment (they will handle our evaluation and assessment criteria), creation of the "Assistant" figure in the medium term, increase of family participation in the school daily life, teachers' continued training (cooperative learning, mindfulness, languages), improvement of the school climate (mediation course provided for all our education community).
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