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Breaking down of school barriers Inclusive educational experiences to create school as a training ground for democracy (John Dewey)
Start date: Sep 1, 2015, End date: Aug 31, 2018 PROJECT  FINISHED 

In recent years, the degree of complexity within our classes has increased greatly. Different levels of learning abilities, different inclinations and interests, different emotional and affective states, different multicultural and linguistic complexities coexist within the same class, together with the presence of students with a varied spectrum of specific learning disorders or severe disability. This context requires, by contrast, a new school which will configure itself as a humanized, highly inclusive and integral space, built on the importance of the single human being as a person, his peculiarity and potential, empathy, solidarity and collaboration. School must be able to become a training place for democracy, implementing mutual acceptance and enhancement. It is therefore an essential priority to direct the educational practice towards full effectiveness, activating concrete operational mechanisms, improving the quality of the daily process of teaching - learning and creating conditions of effective equality and opportunities. Diversity (linguistic, of cultural models, intelligence or skill) is often perceived and evaluated in negative terms, as a weakness. The risk is that such diversity can be transformed into inequality of opportunity and results. Recognizing and giving value to diversity in the class becomes a matter of social justice and a way to ensure that every student has the right to study and the right to have access to effective opportunities in order to be able to choose and design their own future. It is therefore important to create the conditions for the realization of fair educational contexts, in which all students will have access to diverse learning environments, multiple resources, different points of view built on stimulating, flexible and innovative curriculum. Learning, understanding and problem solving are processes that need to take place in an environment of equality, in which each student will have the real chance to attain the best possible results. The goal of the project is to create an innovative and sustainable MODULE OF INCLUSION that will overcome the barriers and constraints of a static and traditional school system. This will result in building an innovative, multi-dimensional, multi-level and inclusive educational world that will be responsive to the needs of all and of each student, a reality without limits and with no spatial and pedagogical barriers. Students will be the protagonists of the project, assisted by the whole school community, teachers and school helpers, families and local communities, in order to involve all stakeholders in a shared process of change. The diverse situation within our schools makes it necessary to focus on the students as a fundamental resource for the teacher in terms of learning potentials and cohesion of the group. The methodological choice, therefore, that best responds to the idea of an inclusive and inter-cultural school is "social mediation". The methodologies in social mediation, while providing moments of transmission, involve a change of perspective: from the traditional vertical teacher-student interaction to the horizontal student-student, where skills are actively built by the same students, rather than passive reception of information. In this context, the use of methods of social mediation such as Cooperative Learning (Cooperative learning) or Peer Tutoring (peer mentoring) are particularly effective strategies to build on the relational, cognitive, intra-personal (strengthening of self-awareness and self-confidence) and interpersonal levels (development of trust in others, the ability to negotiate the information, to build an empathic relationship). It is understood that these positive trends are not "spontaneous" in students, but represent a goal where the mediation of the teacher is fundamental. Teachers must, therefore, build a strategy through their daily work that creates habits for effective cooperation, and explicitly, through feedback that induces in students a progressive degree of awareness of the progress that is made.
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