Search for European Projects

Booster the emotional dimension of social inclusion for immigrant mothers and children
Start date: Oct 1, 2016, End date: Sep 30, 2018 PROJECT  FINISHED 

The BONDS proposal intends to design and develop specific training/education programme for immigrant mothers and children, focusing on the acquisition of key competences and soft skills for social inclusion and well-being through the methodology of Collaborative Comics Storytelling. More than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe in 2015, compared with just 280,000 the year before. The scale of the crisis continues, with more than 135,000 people arriving in the first two months of 2016.The EU’s external borders have increasingly been the scene of human tragedies to which the EU, together with its Member States, must take immediate action. Migration often involves the separation of families and changed roles within families. It can be a traumatic experience that affects children and mothers’ sense of well-being. Moreover, severe post-migration living difficulties such as delays in processing refugee applications, obstacles to employment, racial discrimination, and loneliness, can contribute to long term difficulties in emotional dimension and the social inclusion of these people in the host contexts.At the same time, migration needs to be better managed in all its aspects; through the European Agenda on Migration (2015), the EU aims at providing its Member States with tools to do so in the medium as well as long term.The Agenda states that European migration policy will succeed if underpinned by effective integration policies.This is why the programme will be aimed at the acquisition of soft skills and language/cultural/ICT/social and civic competences through the exploitation of the emotional dimension of training. These competences will also provide women and children opportunities for public voice (providing information on access to social services, on on access to communication and rights and responsibilities), which are fundamental for a real social inclusion in the host community.Comics will be used for two main reasons:- it is a narrative form that combines two other forms of expression, words and pictures. During the creation of a comic story you might work alone or you might have to work with others as a collaborative and co-creation oriented-team, building on diverse backgrounds, knowledge, experiences and skills (script writer and penciler, inker, letterer etc). Comics creation is nevertheless a co-creation process. Either you work alone, or you work inside a team you always interact with your audience and external environment. We use comics storytelling as a tool to foster collaboration, teamwork and creativity;- comics, according to many scholars and educators do not tell the stories of creatures with supernatural powers, but they also have this supernatural power to transfer knowledge. According to many researchers comics can strengthen “students’ understanding of literary devices such as point of view, themes, symbolism, allusions, morals, tone and mood, flashback, and foreshadowing” , as well as reading comprehension and understanding (Gavigan, 2010). Four main activities will be realized in order to achieve the project objectives:- the first activity is a preliminary survey for defining the main contextual factors that in the host community affect emotional/knowledge dimension of immigrant women and children and hinder their social inclusion; - the second activity is the planning of educational workshops and seminars for women and children as part of an educational programme for letting them acquire key competences for social inclusion and well-being. These key competences will mainly focus in three areas, namely a) soft skills for social inclusion and well-being; b) accessing critical information such as social services (including online services and media as a source of information and civil participation though ICT) and rights and responsibilities; improving family-school relationships (through making explicit information on the school system, its organization and structure that is often perceived as tacit knowledge for the locals); c) promoting the social inclusion of families through the provision of cultural-content courses in the language of the hosting country with translation facilities and multimodal means for both mothers and their children;- the third activity is the evaluation of the educational programme at European level so to define its effectiveness and impact;- the fourth activity provide the realization of a specific framework for organizations working with immigrants as well as policy makers, aimed at developing training models which address the needs of immigrants. The project action will be carried out at European level, in national contexts characterised by different migration flows and policies, because we need to identify sustainable solutions to prevent immigrants social exclusion and this requires more systematic cooperation across a range of actors and policies at EU and Member State level.
Up2Europe Ads

Coordinator

Details

7 Partners Participants