People willing to become active European citizens need knowledge, skills and the right attitudes concerning democratic structures and active participation. For all these reasons we created a partnership from different schools and countries and we joined our forces in order to learn the human values. A Lifelong Learning Programme supposes intercultural dialogue, as partners from different countries and cultures were involved. Any discrimination national or religious was excluded. This program offered the occasion of a better acquaintance between countries, their residents, as well as, the way of promotion of intercultural education against the racism and xenophobia.Intercultural dialogue is the basis for real and lasting understanding and respect, which can only be built up through the acquisition of knowledge about other cultures. In our intercultural dialogue we tried to combat ignorance, prejudice, racism and xenophobia.The main concepts of the project was the sensitization to the idea of “other people” and reflection on one's own intercultural identity. The concepts were expressed through the topics of migration, cultural diversity, stereotypes, prejudice,tolerance, traditions, human and children rights, respect and self awareness. The final products MY CULTURAL IMPRESSIONS notebook and short films are living witnesses of progress achieved by the project. The students involved in the project did use languages, ICT, theatre, cinema, music, photo, arts, culture, local dances, traditions and local customs, as vehicles for research and to communicate the results of their work.The schools involved created the portfolios which include photos, paintings, video, theatre , etc. and shared them in project website and digital newspaper. A new learning environment which is attractive to teachers, students and the whole school was gradually created, favoring innovation and creativity in the field of teaching. At the meetings we worked together, become more aware of our own national identity and at the same time we learned about and appreciating to other cultures. At a more global level, this project offered a new perspective of culture and values. Our project represented a necessary approach to address the question, how cultural diversity and values can contribute to dialogue in Europe. How European citizens of different religious, cultural and political backgrounds can live together and enter into dialogue of mutual respect and understanding. The project examined their belonging to Europe while discussing their outward cultural identity, thus opening the debate to include issue of migration, racism, integration, mutual understanding, tolerance and acceptance of everyone in Europe. We are currently witnessing a new generation of young people who are redefining their cultural identity in a changing Europe. Many children of migrants were born in/out Europe, went to school in Europe and tired to work and create a family in Europe.Nine European meetings took place during the development of the project and allowed the European dimension of activities to be reinforced. Teachers and students were able to benefit from these exchanges and meetings, thus creating a true opportunity for intercultural exchanges and dialogue. The project aimed to raise awareness amongst EUROPEAN citizens and particularly among young people on the importance of using intercultural dialogue as a tool for promoting an active European citizenship. The target group included students and teachers. The foreseen activities were discussion, survey, case study,workshops, promotion of ICH/TCH,seminar, digital newspaper, international folk dance and song team.The objectives were:To raise awareness of the importance of intercultural dialogue, especially among young people, which aims to contribute to foster an active European citizenship – cosmopolitan and with respect for cultural diversity.To enhance interest and respect for the originality and variety of other cultural, national and religious groups.To confront younger generations with differences in culture, opinions and behavior and to look for ways to cope with these issues in an open manner without judging each other.The motto of our project was: Nice to meet you!Subjects: Migration,Early Leaving School, Racism, Stereotypes, Tolerance, Acceptance of differences.The project method was an educational enterprise in which children solved a practical problem. The students first chose the project, and then they discussed what they need to know for solving the problem and learned the required techniques and concepts. Finally they executed the chosen project by themselves.Time for reflection was provided during all phases of project learning, gave students the opportunity to evaluate their progress.The phases of approach: Discussion and sensitization, organization and realization of activities, collecting information, synthesis and process of information, evaluation.

"Historically, human mobility has taken place since the beginning of time, but it has been during the last century when this phenomenon began to be considered a challenge. Most European countries have moved from immigrant countries to migration countries. These processes of significant changes in the ethno-cultural composition are sometimes confronted with rejection among native groups. Diversity is a fact and a need that has been experienced in all European countries. Therefore, cultural integration is one of the most important developments in the European Union. In some parts of the world, immigrants are subject to arbitrary and discriminatory treatment by authorities and other members of society. Intercultural communication is necessary to ensure social adaptation, to develop pluralism and consciousness of living together in order to get more respect and solidarity between different cultures and to eliminate prejudices as soon as in Europe.Our goal is the study of migration in Europe, particularly of people belonging to ethnic minorities living in our countries and local areas, sharing this information with our European partners. Thus, we shall concentrate on the issues faced by immigrants as prejudice and discrimination in society, the problems of their children at school and their struggle to participate in the culture of the place where they live in the period of social integration. Moreover, our project aims to teach our students ""Immigration"" and the values of different cultures and ethnic identities. What we seek with this project is to interest students about immigrants and make them aware of the presence of other cultures and know that by working collaboratively and cooperatively with partner schools, they can understand and appreciate the cultural differences.The project aims to open among European teachers and students a common reflection on the theme of migration and integration, based on the recovering, by means of direct sources and interviews, the historic memory of the people who were migrants and of those who hosted migrants in the past, and by comparing what is happening in the present, again listening to both side of the story, the migrants, and the natives. By studying closely the movement of migration we aim to develop an understanding of the intercultural dimension in European societies. In today’s expanded Europe, given the increasing ease with which people can cross borders and find work outside their own country, it seems vital that our students be able to tolerate the views of those whose origins and background are different from their own. We will work on the measures taken throughout Europe to overcome stereotypes and prejudices and ensure that immigrants arriving are as well integrated as possible. The question of identity is of key importance in any discussion involving closer integration of the immigrant population. Is it desirable for immigrants to strive to remain loyal to their origins or should they aim to assimilate the culture, language and traditions of their adopted land? How do indigenous populations react to the influx of EU nationals in large numbers? What problems has this migration created and how are they dealing with it?We will also deal with the problems immigrants experience during the process of their psychological and sociocultural adaptation to the host culture ;Coping With Culture Shock, Cultural Clashes and Cultural ,Getting Past Language and Communication Barriers and Coping with Homesickness and Alienation.We will do seminars to emphasize these problems . Each school will create project groups made of students and the groups will have interviews with the immigrants. In each study visit,one of the interviewed immigrant will be invited .The immigrant will share his experience before and after the migration. The movies about migration will be watched. Then the students will be asked to discuss their feelings and thoughts about the migration which is also the subject of the movies. An authority from agencies working on migration issues will be invited to the meetings. Case studies analyzing specific aspects of the personal experience of migration and a dictionary with the meanings and definitions of key words about migration and integration will be done.The project methodolgy is based on the concept of interdisciplinary teaching as a means to enhance the quality of education. Our partners represent contrasting social and economic backgrounds, and a diverse collection of communities from across Europe. Our target group are pupils, parents, collegues, pedagogical staff, boards of schools and the public.We believe that our project is compatible with EU youth policy in attempt to develop young people’s spirit of entrepreneurship. The increased environmental and common cultural wealth awareness in participants as well as in local communities, will contribute to young people to develop their personalities."

The “final solution” to physically exterminate the Jews arose gradually in the Nazi regime after a policy of propaganda, stigmatization, isolation and deportation of them. For reasons that appeared as necessary back then, public opinion was convinced of the need of their expulsion in concentration camps, where, till the end of World War II, six million Jews had been massively killed. It was named “final solution” because it solved once and for good the problem of coexistence, within a pure nation, of a group of people that was spoiling the idea of a homogeneous Germany that Adolf Hitler was putting forth.The educational system that Europe is putting forth nowadays, seventy-four years after the end of the war, bespeaks the necessity of the social inclusion of disadvantaged groups of people. The Unesco Convention Against Discrimination in Education (1960) prohibits any exclusion from, or limitation to, educational opportunities on the basis of differences, such as sex, ethnic/social origin, language, religion, economic condition, ability. In December 2017, the European Commission of the Union adopted the European Pillar of Social Rights, the first principle of which is that “Everyone has the right to quality and inclusive education, training and life-long learning in order to maintain and acquire skills that enable them to participate fully in society and manage successfully transitions in the labour market”. Evening Highschools in Greece provide education to working pupils above 14 years of age, who have not completed their basic education or fail to do so in morning schools. For this reason, they have been considered as schools with pupils of a lesser quality, something that may lead to their stigmatization or marginalization, although these schools work through inclusive education: at the 1st Evening Highschool of Patras, for example, people of different ages attend lessons, ranging from 14 to 71 years of age, coming, moreover, from different nationalities, different learning backgrounds, and vulnerable social groups (ex drug addicts, Roma and immigrants).This year, the 1st Evening Highschool of Patras is taking over for the first time the coordination of a strategic partnership that leads hopefully, though the studying of the Holocaust, to the elimination of discrimination in classroom and to social inclusion. The project’s objective is for the pupils to get to learn a significant chapter of History, now that Europe is being threatened by extreme right wing policies within itself, and to apply in their environment, e.g. the classroom, principles and values of a democratic coexistence, without discrimination.Four different schools have been chosen on the basis of their historical and geographical relationship to World War II and the Holocaust, on the basis of the participating teachers’ interest and on the basis of pupils’ profile (inclusive classrooms or geographically isolated pupils). These are a Highschool in Sarkad, Hungary, a Highschool in Iasi, Romania, a Highschool in Hamburg, Germany, and a Technical School in Modena, Italy.Starting from the project that has been posted on etwinning, relating to the archiving of news on fascism and violence from local newspapers and a reading club of books documenting experiences from Holocaust survivors, the activities that have been compiled are crosscurricular, crossdisciplinary, and build on team-based experiential learning. They involve History, Social Studies, Geography, English, Drama and Information Technology, they are student-based, creative, and combine study visits outside the classroom with projects/reports/questionnaires/maps/timelines inside classroom.The expected benefits stemming from this partnership apply to pupils, teachers, the school unit and the local community. The former train basic skills, appreciate the need of social inclusion and become recipients of the values of the European way of living. Participating teachers gain self-confidence in the completion of a strategic partnership as well as in the preparation of an inclusive lesson plan in classrooms. The school unit revives its international profile and consolidates its democratic character, opening up channels of cooperation for future European partnerships. The local community reaps the profits of lifelong learning and of a multicultural environment where difference is tolerated. In the long run, the founding values of the European Union are reinforced and thrive: human dignity, freedom, equality, democracy, human rights. Pupils, citizens and teachers return with more loving attention to where we started from: school, education.

"As mentioned before, we were motivated to apply for this project because we wanted to examine one of the biggest issues the European Union was and is struggling with at the moment: the so-called ""refugee crisis"". On the political scale, European politicians are trying to solve the challenge by a mechanism that forces some countries to welcome refugees. However, this is not the only problem that comes along with this challenge. Also, countries like Germany and Sweden, who have been quite open as lots of migrants fled to Europe in 2015 are still facing challenges of all sorts, ranging from strong right-wing opposition to extremism caused by the inlux of these immigrants, but also because integrating a huge number of people from a different cultural background causes difficulties, no matter where in the world. Other countries, like Greece or Italy, are facing similar problems, especially right-wing and populist opposition to these migrants, but also seem to be left alone in this crisis due to European policies and their geographical situation. All of these countries were part of this project. Spain has a similar problem to Italy, as it is very close to Morocco, Belgium has a similar situation to Germany, as it has a long history of integrating foreign people to their society and a quite multicultural society. All these countries combined, there was a great mix of ways of how of to deal with people from a different cultural background. As we see it, we did all learn from each other, but also helped each other as we have similar and different challenges in each of our countries. However, this issue can only be tackled on an intercultural European scale, which is why we applied for this project. In this project, we compared and exchanged ideas and ways of coping with the issues above (i.e. How to deal with minorities?) in order to help our countries, but also other countries in Europe, to find solutions for this crisis. We see it as a way of showing best-practices on the one hand, but also to show what doesn't work on the other and how to manage these challenges. This project aimed at a general lack of awareness of the other cultures, prejudices and stereotypes against them which can lead to social exclusion. In many countries all over Europe we can see a huge number of children born and raised in countries that are not home to their parents. Due to the fact that a lot of children do not learn the language of the target society properly, as they only speak foreign languages at home and do not grow up in communities that speak the language of the target society, a number of these children lack behind academically.In this project, we aimed at connecting with these students and give them the opportunity to learn outside the regular learning environment by including them into our project. We created an atmosphere where participants were able to recognize prejudgemental and discriminatory behaviour among themselves which in turn formed them into critical thinkers and helped establish a non-exclusional school environment. Students participated on a highly active level during the whole process of the project in order to make them identify with its goals and to have life-long learning effects. We mixed the group of participants, e.g. had students from different cultural and social backgrounds, so that we had a wide spectrum of ideas and a realistic profile of European involvement, as we think that Europe is also not one-dimensional but mulit-facetted. This is something the students learned in this project. We sendt a minimum amount of four students to each LTT. The activities are a mixture of activities that aimed at raising cultural awareness in a European context in generel and activities that aimed at the achievement of our project's objectives in particular (e.g. interviewing migrants). We worked on one of the following subjects: - Migrants' issues - Romas or other minorities - Tolerance, respect and EU Citizenship - Ethnic, racial, cultural and religious diversity - Understanding prejudices and stereotype - Globalization: Loss of cultural identity? We had each of the following activities and results: 1 Presentation 2 Seminar 3 Round table discussion 4 Questionnaire on the subject 5 Guest speaker/s 6 Workshop Creativity (poster contest) 7 Workshop Game (e.g. ice-breakers) 8 International party 9 Trip to a local museum 10 Trip to a cultural site (e.g. UNESCO world heritage) 11 Culture in a box: Each partner school received information on customs, traditions and cultures of another partner. Then a team had to present another country with the information given by the other country. This increased the intercultural exchange and also raise self-awareness among students. 12 Poster on similarities and differences between the host and the guest nation"

"A common challenge for the European school systems is the prevention of early school leaving. Tackling early school leaving is first and foremost an investment in the future. Young people who leave school early are at increased risk of unemployment, poverty and social exclusion. They are often in more precarious and less well-paid jobs than those with training. Generally, children from low education and socially disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely than others to leave the school system early.With our project we got support to develop conducive and supportive learning environments that focused on the needs of individual pupils, especially the disadvantaged ones. We promoted a relevant and engaging learning environment for them.The main goal of our project entitled ""Gates and Keys"" was to create a meaningful and motivating learning atmosphere where they would have the sense of belonging. The pupils were able to realize how important it was to possess a school education and a professional education so that they could take care for their future concerns and become active and responsible citizens who could contribute to Europe. Besides, the project was framed on different levels to reach as many pupils as possible and to motivate them to gain interesting and positive experiences which kept up their motivation for learning. We experienced that extra-curricular activities did not only help students to catch up and to revive their interest in learning, but also helped them to re-build a positive relationship with the school and its staff, as well as providing fulfilling activities which boosted self-esteem and reduced frustration.As early-school leaving is closely related to social exclusion, we blended the discovery of reasons of social exclusion, such as prejudices and cultural barriers with the factors of early school leaving. Students discovered themselves through discovering the ""other"". That's why we carried out our studies in the form of a transnational project which offered chances to compare and discover.For years, we have been confined to see through the key holes, which has caused us to misconceive the big picture. It was high time we had found the right keys and opened the doors. In order to take our place in the big picture and touch it to better understand , we, 8 partners from different countries or backgrounds, Turkey, 2 Italian Schools, United Kingdom, Germany, Hungary,Poland and Denmark came together and had the idea of this transnational project which would give us the clues to be able to find the keys in the maze.Mobilities of both students and teachers across Europe constituted an integral part of our approach, along with the use of information and communication technologies. Our students participated in activities in multinational teams and acquired active, hands-on experiences by engaging with exploring, evaluating, mapping, meeting volunteer teams, music, dance and art.In a united Europe students and teachers greatly benefited from working together with partners from other European countries, thus they were able to learn to understand and accept other cultures and their traditions. Furthermore, they raised their cultural awareness, broadened their horizon and learnt a lot about working on projects in teams, connecting them to school.With this project we mainly addressed to pupils in the age of 14-17 who attended secondary school. At every participating school there was a class or group of pupils who worked on the topics with various subject teachers. Besides an own website, where we published our project work for all people, we also made Erasmus+ corners to attract people who cannot read about our project in the internet. Through the activities the joy about learning was supported in a long term way. The students involved in the project used languages, ICT, theatre, cinema, music, photo, arts, culture, local dances, traditions and local customs, as vehicles for research and to communicate the results of their work.Our students got familiar with abstract concepts and were able to encounter with real problems rather than ready made problems. In this way, they had the opportunity of learning to deal with uncertainity and making decisons. Finally, the results of our interaction reached our schools through products such as Booklets: religions-similarities and difference, Rituals and My Health Guidebook and Poster:How can we reduce racial prejudice and racism? , a website, exhibitions, ideas for lesson plans, workshops and presentations.At the end of the project the reports of our round table discussions were collected.The proposals were identified to reduce school drop-out schools-wide.The project was developed through different stages which the schools involved run simultaneously, with a joint work event at a distance."