“Sharing the world” – Project Description
If we help each other, we can go far together. Children, young people and adults need to learn building their life values like friendship, partnership, tolerance, consideration and mutual help. It is from this idea that our project „Sharing the world“ started. We noticed that:
- the rights of children have always been a focus in society (the convention of the rights of children is the most ratified treaty).
- all the partners were interested in the difficulties and the barriers children with mild and more serious disabilities face in the society and we realized that the risk of isolation is much bigger for these children, as well as the risk of being discriminated.
Our project “Sharing the world: disability and displacement” is focused on the rights of children with special needs (disability, isolated and orphan children, refugees). The main objectives of the project are:
- for the disabled/displaced children: a better integration at school and in society, avoiding school leaving
- for the other pupils in school, teachers and community: raise awareness and empathy, learn about children rights
- for the teachers: exchange of good practices.
Our project started after seeing the necessity for pupils and the society to better understand and respect the rights of all children (and people in general). We therefore want to propose a project to promote inclusion, social integration and interest in others as well as empathy. Our project is based on several important rights of children (to housing, health, education, inclusion in society, non-discrimination). During this project we will work on understanding and applying this rights, especially for the disabled and displaced children (by displaced children we understand: refugees, isolated children or orphans).
The project will last 2 years (2017 – 2019), it involves 7 European schools: France, Latvia, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Turkey. We will organise 3 transnational meetings at the beginning, middle and end (Portugal, Latvia and Turkey) and 4 learning/training activities (Romania, France, Slovakia, Slovenia). The purpose of all the learning and teaching activities (C1-C4, mentioned in details, which will be realised in Romania, France, Slovakia, Slovenia) is to create a community of people interested in children’s rights and willing to protect the rights of disabled/displaced children and people in general. By better understanding the needs of disabled people, we can develop a society where social inclusion is a successful objective. Each of the learning/training activities was planned for a specific purpose and it is focused on one children’ s right.
The project has 4 main parts that are developed during the 2 years: introduction part, raising awareness (part 2) and encouraging integration (part 3) and conclusion (part 4). Each part is meant to help the people involved directly and indirectly to better understand the project and become involved in solving the problem. We plan to organise around one main activity/month in every country. The activities that take place before a learning/training mobility have as a main purpose the preparation of the mobility. In this way both the teachers and the pupils taking place in the mobility are prepared when they go to the partner country.
The project final materials are very varied: flyers, short cooking book, video, exhibition, website. We hope to transform the website into a platform of online teaching and learning materials on the topic. We would like to create materials after each activity and then use them to create a website. This website can become a platform of resources for other schools or associations interested in this topic. Apart from the online environment, we plan to involve the local media (written press, radio, tv) and the local authorities in the dissemination of our work. This is a topic of general interest, therefore we believe that the local community could be interested in our project and help us accomplish our dissemination objectives (by reading our materials, coming to the events we organise etc).
Our project is meant to have an impact on each school, but also on the local community and hopefully (especially through our website) on the national and international community. Our purpose is to involve as many people as possible in this project, in order to send our message as far as possible.