DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT

DISCOVERING CULTURAL DIVERSITY WITH PUPILS AND THEIR PARENTS

  DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT

Our school is located in a residential settlement with culturally mixed population. We are constantly facing with challenges concerning immigrant students. Most of them are second or third generation of immigrants, but there are a few students every year from first generation and come to our school with no or only basic language knowledge.

Slovenia has a one-way integration policy which requires one-way inclusion of students to our education system. Schools are based on an inclusion and therefore they must constantly look for new ways to adapt the system to each student. The concept of inclusive schools is also based on the principle of inter-culturalism, which is being implemented in different aspects of intercultural participation. Every school has a different approach and it is in their own hands in what way and to what extent they will establish a multicultural environment.

Our school is very successful with inclusion of immigrant children. Successful inclusion is our priority mission in the curriculum. We have multiple children from different countries: Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova, Russia, and Bulgaria. Our school has 18 % of immigrant children without Slovenian citizenship. Our teachers have special sense for those children and are always willing to help them with courses of Slovenian language. We are also part of other connected activities, such as national project called Increased social and cultural capital in local communities.

Research that was made by one of our teachers and also our personal observations have shown that, despite all those measures, those children remain marginalized. They have different cultural backgrounds, parenting support and economic situations. Those differences affect school progress in many individuals. They often become socially excluded and we are also dealing with physical or mental violence from or towards them.

We have implemented many successful approaches to reduce such events – warm reception, tutoring, intensive language courses, individual support, counsellor treatment, extension classes, remedial classes and a two-year conditional evaluation. We decided we want to take our experiences to another level. We want to present our successful methods to international schools with similar challenges. We would also like to cooperate and find new, even better solutions for solving the problems of school integration for immigrant children.

Primary target group of this project are immigrant students. Besides them we would like to help other immigrants, refugees and marginalized groups in our local community and society in general. Essential part of this project is cooperation with parents and local communities. Fundamental objectives pursued in this project are: increasing tolerance by learning about different cultures, parent participation in schools, expressing of identity, better socialization and cooperation with local communities for less learning and behavioural problems.

We want to implement this project on an international level so we can share our experiences with others, learn about theirs and find successful solutions together. Besides that, we want to evaluate results of our project not only on school, local community and national level but also on international level. Our secondary goal is to develop international cooperation, improve the level of languages, communication, use of ICT in cooperation, implementation of activities, dissemination etc.

PROJECT SUMMARY

Our project is called Discovering Cultural Diversity with Pupils and Their Parents. Since our school is located in a culturally diverse area, we have been facing challenges, related to migrant pupils, for many years. We have developed several methods for improving thier integration. We wish to bring these challenges to a higher level and link them with international cooperation. Above all, our goal is to share and upgrade our positive and rich experience in this area through international cooperation and exchange of good practice. We decided on this particular project theme because we notice that migrant pupils in our school are still discriminated, or have learning and/or behaviour difficulties despite numerous activities to prevent it. Because the integration policy, these pupils have to adjust to Slovenian school system. Therefore there aren't enough possibilities for them to actively express their identity. This also seems to be the reason for their deviant behaviour. In this light we have decided to take a step towards enabling them to actively express themselves, especially to actively express their culture. Moreover, our society tends to look rather negatively upon other cultures, migrants, anything different or unknown. This negative attitude has become more noticeable, as the number of refugees and migrants to Europe increases. We thought of finding a joint solution for both problems. At our school there are many migrant pupils and parents involved in school life, therefore we decided to take up this project together with them.

Project goals and objectives are to:

- know more about cultural backgrounds and nationalities of migrant pupils at our school;

- improve migrant pupils' social integration;

- improve IKT skills and increase IKT usage;

- meet pupils through different ways of international integration;

- establish a better connection between pupils, parents, school and local community as well as mutual cooperation between them;

- increase pupils' tolerance to children with different social backgrounds;

- improve these pupils' learning achievements;

- increase tolerance to refugees and migrants entering EU and to being different in general

- stimulate active involvement of teachers, pupils and parents in project implementation

Primarily, the project will include pupils, parents and other school employees. It also aims to actively involve local society. Other citizens will benefit from the project through media (local and national). Schools participating in a fine arts competition will also be included in the project, which will thus spread onto international level. The project will spread on regional, national and international level also via its own website, eTwinning platform and various social networks.

In order to achieve the project goals and objectives we plan to organize numerous activities at our partner schools. As part of the project, a concert will take place as well as dance classes, fairy tale workshops, making jewellery and other products, learning children's games, cooking traditional dishes, karaoke, learning different alphabets, holidays, customs and traditions. It is essential that these activities are carried out by migrant pupils and their parents with teachers' support. All these events strive to encourage parents and pupils to actively learn about cultures of all the pupils at our school. The traditional fine arts competition shall be dedicated to this theme. We will provide all partner schools with a place, where project material will be presented, for example calendar of events, news, articles...

All the activities, project implementation and its results, material and recordings will be presented at the final event, joint picnic of school and local community. The activities will also be published online and on social networks. While implementing the project, tangible and virtual project material will be produced: leaflets, magazine, newspaper, as the project finishes a publication or book, e-magazines, e-diary, blog…

We plan to measure project successfulness by observation, polls, questionnaires, tests, group discussions, interim reports. In terms of project successfulness we are also going to measure productivity, efficiency, involvement, entirety, provability...

The following results are expected: achieving project goals (listed above), creating a successful website, getting good response on social networks, producing high quality project material, providing successful project dissemination, good international cooperation and exchanging good practices between schools. 

                                                                                                                                          SLOVENIA