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Multicultural Schools - Enhancing Cultural and Linguistic Treasure of Europe through Teachers
Start date: Sep 1, 2015, End date: Feb 28, 2018 PROJECT  FINISHED 

EU is founded on “unity in diversity”: diversity of cultures, religions, custom, beliefs and languages. According to Eurostat, on January 2013 there were 33.5 million people born outside of the EU-27 living in an EU-27 Member State, while there were 17.3 million persons who had been born in a different EU-27 Member State from their country of residence. Most of these people that moved from one country to another have settled families where more than one cultural background is experienced in daily life. However, the children of such families are threatened differently and often emerge some problem areas related with the integration of these children at school, concerning both language and educational aspects. For this reason, the project MULTICULTURAL SCHOOLS targets lack of support in adopting new strategies and practices for teachers on capitalisation on cultural diversity in the classroom as, unfortunately, teachers are not prepared on how to adequately integrate these children and how to approach them during their educational path. Thus, the GENERAL OBJECTIVE of this project is to address lack of appropriate skills and competences of teachers on how to deal with multicultural classes and in the same time strengthen profile of teachers, helping them in solving out difficult situations with children coming from different religious and ethnic minorities. The SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES are: - to develop handbook containing new methodology on how to deal with multiculturalism in schools; - to prepare new certified online e-course enabling teachers to acquire new competencies; - to provide ready-to-use materials for teachers to be used in multicultural classrooms for children among 6-13 years; - to promote, preserve and enhance cultural richness of European society. To reach these goals, the project partnership, consisting of organisations from Poland, ITaly, Belgium, Greece and Spain (2 universities, each having different focus, 1 SME, 1 European association of teachers, 1 PA in charge for education, 1 public association in charge for culture and education) have merged their collective experience and specific skills in the field of multicultural education. The project will transfer good practices from two Top rated EU projects: SMILEY - Social Mindedness of Learning Community (www.smileyschool.eu) merged with MULTILINGUAL FAMILIES (www.multilingual-families.eu). The innovative character of the new project will be based on adding another fundamental dimension: (multi)cultural aspects as “core resources” for multilingual education. The project will firstly produce O1 - REPORT ON THE CHALLENGES FACED BY TEACHERS IN THEIR EDUCATIONAL WORK, that will work as the basis for further outputs, to clarify on which areas project should in particularly focus on. Project will further develop O2 - AUTO-ASSESSMENT TEST FOCUSING ON TEACHERS AND TEACHING IN MULTICULTURAL CLASSES through which teachers will be able to test their skills and capacities related to work with such classes. In order to reinforce collaboration among teachers and parents, the partners will collect GOOD PRACTISES OF COOPERATION AMONG SCHOOLS AND PARENTS (O5) giving real examples to be taken as inspirations. As the key output, project will provide teachers with O4 - TEACHER’S HANDBOOK ON CULTURALLY INCLUSIVE EDUCATION, based on Q&A model, giving suggestions on different situations teachers face. Handbook will be developed in all 24 EU’s Official languages. This output will refer to O3 - REPOSITORY OF ACTIVITIES FOR TEACHERS, containing ready-to-use resources, activities and materials in classes. In addition, ONLINE NETWORKING & LEARNING PLATFORM (O6) will enable networking and exchanging hands-on experiences through discussion groups of teachers, educators and parents. The handbook will have online extension and will be transformed into PROBLEM-BASED-LEARNING (PBL) E-COURSE FOR TEACHERS (O7) that will release certificate after successful completion. This certificate will be guaranteed by University of Catania - Department of Educational Sciences. The main impact of the project: - involvement of at least 10.000 teachers in project activities thanks to wide network of partners (The European Teachers Association and Regional Directorate of Education in Greece); - establishment of EU network through online learning & networking platform; - Handbook on Culturally Inclusive Education easily exploited in all EU countries thanks to translation in 24 EU’s official languages; - online e-course for teachers in EN, FR, ES, IT, PL, GR; - dissemination towards more than 50.000 teachers across Europe. Considering this, MULTICULTURAL SCHOOLS project will provide new teachers’ competences and respond to up-to-dated questions about multiculturalism in schools and contribute to mutual recognition of every form of cultural diversity as “a treasure” for the next EU generations.

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