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UNITED WE PLAY, UNITED WE WIN: DEVELOPING SOCIAL S..
UNITED WE PLAY, UNITED WE WIN: DEVELOPING SOCIAL SKILLS AND INCLUSIVE EDUCATION THROUGH SPORT AND OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES
Start date: Sep 1, 2015,
End date: Aug 31, 2017
PROJECT
FINISHED
As teachers and educators we would like our students to live and act in a positive and confident atmosphere at school, at home and anywherelse. So we think the way to reach this goal is to create a peaceful, relaxing and challenging atmosphere where they can strengthen, train, develop their learning abilities, education, awareness and knowledge for their future life to better support competitiveness and employment at all levels and to live a satisfying future life.
The main concept of the project named “UNITED WE PLAY, UNITED WE WIN: DEVELOPING SOCIAL SKILLS AND INCLUSIVE EDUCATION THROUGH SPORT AND OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES” is to use sports and outdoor activities as attractive and powerful interdisciplinary educational tool for achieving outcomes on several levels: a healthy and physically active lifestyle; inclusive education; knowledge and learning through innovative methods by making educational environment friendlier, more open and in line with individual needs of every single student; tolerance and respect for other people and cultures, better understanding of their own personal qualities, confidence and self-belief, perspectives for their future development as active members of the European Community. Alongside with sports and learning activities students are taught and trained to social skills – to cooperate and collaborate as part of a team for achieving a common goal, to be leaders, to communicate, express opinions, make decisions; to support weaker members of the team, to be tolerant and caring to others, to oppose negative influences. Students teach and learn to and from one another.
The participants of this project are seven European countries: Bulgaria, Iceland, Italy Lithuania, Romania, Spa and ,Turkey. Three of the partners – Bulgaria, Iceland and Turkey haven’t had experience in this kind of international projects. Turkish, Romanian and Lithuanian schools are located in rural areas, three partner organizations are in small towns – Iceland, Italy and Spain and the other two partner organizations are on remote islands – Iceland and Italy (Sardinia). Two partners – Bulgaria, Romania are countries with the lowest living standard in Europe.
All partner organizations of our project are state public schools with students (our target groups are students from 10 to 14 and from 10 to 16 disadvantaged students) who need support for achieving better educational standards, personal development and perspective for future social and professional accomplishment – students with special needs and students from socio-economical disadvantaged families at risk of early school leaving.
For a better cooperation and enhancing the European dimension of our schools we will promote a larger use of English language through the ITC tools in order to facilitate the learning and teaching process during the activities in each country and in a direct, face-to-face communication during the transnational learning meetings.
The project activities include several stages: preparation, research, learning, processing and exchange of knowledge and good practices, using a variety of up-to-date methodologies and approaches such as: PBL, cooperative learning, learning- by-teaching, peer and group learning, flipped classrooms, CLIL. In terms of effect, the activities can fall into two large groups, a practical one, in which students experience all kinds of traditional and new types of sports and a theoretical category which is actually a study of how this approach can change a lot of different teaching areas, from transmitting pure knowledge to altering attitudes and modeling ways of life and characters.
The desired impact of our project is spreading among people on different levels (students, teachers and other stakeholders) that everybody can concur and contribute to make educational environment friendlier, more open, accessible, exciting, stress-free, attractive, engaging and stimulating for everyone. The idea of a systemic use of learning by enjoying through using different and attractive tools is an innovative aspect to be shared in every school and everywhere.
The availability of the results, as public teaching resources, accessible for all users from the educational media also after the end of the project, will be ensured by their presence on the following platforms: eTwinning, Twinspace and Erasmus+ Dissemination Platform.
On a long term, it is also worth mentioning the publication of our comprehensive project Digital Guide, along with the urge and support to apply it. We will gladly coach all the similar organizations that are willing to implement parts of this new teaching-learning-assessing methodology.