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| School Principal Sandra Scicolone and Tiziana Finocchiaro, Warsaw, May 2018 host the European Parliament |
At the end of July 2017 the
Italian school was the first
to receive the positive answer from its National Agency, regarding
the support of the project “From (im)migrants
to citizens: old roots Vs new opportuninties”. I still
remember I was on the Alps, at that moment, holidaying with my family
and up there, at 2500 mt high, I was out of the world. Getting down,
approaching the nearest village, my phone beeped. It was a message
form our Italian N.A., informing us that the project had received a
positive assessment. Too early to start working, but we were
required, as the coordinating school, to contact the other partners
and check if they were still interested to be part of the team. Not
easy to get in touch with everyone, in the summertime, and it took us
one week to have a positive feedback from all our partner countries.
An official communication from each N.A. would follow. As the other
applicant countries did not have any results at that moment, we
considered that our main task would be to inform the community where
we live about the project, its topic and its aims. Thanks to the very
open and co-operative media in Gela, we published an article on La
Sicilia and our Principal, Ms Sandra Scicolone gave an
interview to the regional press. During the summer the 7 project
leaders of the applicant countries, France, Germany, Hungary,
Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, exchanged e-mails,
trying to find out about each other’s results. On our side, we
started planning the different activities, which proved to be not
such a hard task as most of the utline had already been set up during
the project design.
October brought the final
results: all partner schools had been funded and we were ready to
start.
The first
TPM meeting took place in
Faro, Portugal in November 2017 and according to the
participants it fulfilled its aims: we agreed on the dates and
activities of the project meetings and, even though figures had been
approved already, we kept into consideration the possibility to
increase the general number of mobilities. Above all, having the
opportunity to meet and get to know each other was of high importance
regarding the future of the project. This meeting proved to be very
important for the implementation of the project: it gave us all the
right idea of each school’s engagement in the project and the
degree of factuality peculiar to each staff .
The following months were quite
busy: the selection of the students who would take part in the next
project meetings was slow and difficult due to the high number of
students who wanted to participate. Finally students were chosen,
according to the 11-15 age range set during the application phase. It
was not easy to combine, as sometimes the students interest in the
projects fell out of the age range, but teachers, schools and
families were very cooperative and, throughout the project life, it
was possible to accommodate students in hosting families. In the end,
we were able offer to more students than expected the possibility to
take part to the mobility activities, also in force of bilateral
agreements on mutual exchange. Nevertheless, some students were not
included in the mobility plan, for many reasons, but they were able
to work at school and from home a the same. It really is very
encouraging to see how motivated, enthusiastic our students are, and
the way they seem interested in the project topic. Indeed, it is very
actual, and it seems to be a hot topic in Europe, but students,
schools, communities, show that they really care about welcoming and
inclusion as a matter which overcomes national boundaries.
Since that first communication, received up there, on the Alps,
almost two years have elapsed, and project meetings have been spaced
out by on-line and on-site activities. Most of the educational
programme has been centred on peer-to-peer learning and on the
importance of innovative approaches to increase motivation to work
and reduce early school leaving. That is why all students and
teachers were involved in a new way of working: no more paper posters
and paper work, but huge, massive interest on technology, shared
documents, digital outputs - all this, interwoven with the project
fil-rouge of (im)migration and welcoming. I have learnt so much,
during these past years. Not only about human mobilities, but above
all about people, and habits and the fact that, beyond borders,
beyond nationalities, we all have the same strong sense of duty and
respect for our work as teachers and educators. Projects make it
possible for European teachers to meet and work together, up to us to
make it possible for the future to work on Erasmus+ activities and
have the same, positive results in terms of learnings and outputs.
To keep the metaphor alive, we
are on our
way to the end. That
not a real end, though.
The project is nearly over, but we if look back at these past two
years we can guess that the project impact has been very strong in
each school: we have learnt to read and write according to the new
language of technology, but we have also learnt to refine our way of
listening to the others: welcoming is not only about accepting
foreign people in our home
town and in our school, it
is mainly about accepting and integrating diversity as “Borders
aren’t walls! Borders are doors to be opened!”.
Tiziana Finocchiaro
Scuola Secondaria di primo grado
Ettore Romagnoli – Gela (IT)
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