My ideal school; the school I would like

Find here below all the materials prepared by the NEW ABC partners who first came up with this pilot action. You can find some particularities, the handbook prepared to explain the whole implementation process, and templates and specific materials produced for carrying out some activities.

This handbook proposes to give voice to the real needs of children (and families) in education and to increase the visibility of how inclusion can be co-created with the ideas of teachers, children and their relatives.

Wrap-up of the action

Testing country
Italy

Type of action
At-school activities

Children age
Groups of 3-6 and 6-12 years

Download the handbook to learn how this pilot action was implemented

Activities you will find in this handbook:

  • The book club
  • Kamishibai on inclusion
  • Renovating a room
  • Creating a digital book
  • Puppet theater
  • Poetry
  • A school to eat

Click here for material and resources related to the activities

  • Receive feedback from participants

Template to collect participants’ feedback after sessions (editable Word document)

The template in PDF (non editable)

Find here below all the materials prepared by the NEW ABC partners who replicated this pilot action. The second pilot of the action was adapted from the first pilot, after taking support and inspiration from the partners previously implementing it. You can find some data about the particularities at which these activities were conducted, you can download the handbook prepared to explain the whole implementation process, and finally, you can get access to the templates and specific materials produced for carrying out some activities.

Wrap-up of the action

Testing country
Cyprus

Type of action
At-school activities

Children age
Pre-primary, Primary, Secondary school

Download the handbook to learn how this repilot action was implemented

Activities you will find in this handbook:

  • The Wall of Kindness
  • The Classroom of Love
  • Kamishibai for friendship
  • An Intercultural Library at the school
  • Stories for self-improvement
  • The ideal school, through the eyes of the children
  • The school I dream of
  • Beyond national identities, religions, and beliefs, we are all friends!
  • Always happy to get together
  • Our own vegetable garden
  •  Composting, nature’s recycling

NEW ABC wants to share some tips to make it easier for you to adapt the activities to your own context. Click on each of them to see a longer explanation with examples and further details.

Evaluate the most suitable way to approach linguistic and cultural diversity

Feel free to adapt the activities included in this action according to your context and participants. For example, the focus might not be the same if you are working on linguistic and cultural diversity with local or long-time settled migrant communities (as in this repilot action), or if your participants are recently arrived refugees (as in the original pilot action), who might need a different approach to discover the linguistic and cultural heritage of the host community.

Plan with flexibility and avoid frustration if activities do not go as expected

Instead, allow pupils to lead and eventually transform the activities according to their needs and interests. For example, children might be interested in using the proposed activities to discuss other related experiences and concerns or to use other ways to express their points of view. Thus, when planning your activities, try to provide different options and spaces for pupils’ decision-making, and don’t get stressed in the face of unexpected changes, as this is part of co-creation.

Do not pre-define what languages, cultures and other key concepts are

Following principles of co-creation and collaboration, avoid imposing pre-established definitions of the action’s key concepts and allow children to express and build their own understandings of languages and cultures according to their repertoires and life experiences. Keep an open mind and consider that starting from what is relevant for them will probably make your action more meaningful and engaging.

Explore the neighbourhood where your action will be developed before going out with pupils

This will allow you to identify potential opportunities and challenges for children’s exploration during the field trip activity so that you can better promote and support their reflection about the cultural and linguistic landscapes around them. Having a previous idea of what can be found in their local context can also be helpful in deciding how many groups to create for the outing and how many adults will be needed to watch them over, as well as how many sites to document per group and which areas might be more convenient to explore.

Identify some engaging resource(s) that might work as a trigger to start your action

This could be for example a music video, a short, animated film, or any other resource from child/youth popular culture that might serve to introduce the topic of linguistic and cultural diversity in an attractive way and to encourage pupils to talk about their related experiences. Using an engaging ‘hook’ on your first session might make a big difference in children’s disposition towards deeper reflection in the upcoming activities. You can also use this resource to open the room for pupils’ own preferences. For example, in our action, we started by watching a music video from a Moroccan-Catalan hip-hop artist. This led pupils to share other videos from their favourite Arabic/Catalan rappers and to reflect together on why these artists and their lyrics made an impact on them.

Give voice and recognition to pupils’ multiple experiences, languages, cultures, manners and ways of behaving

Many of the things that children know and do in their daily lives are not usually visible or acknowledged at school, including the languages that they know and use at home, as well as other features and skills. Look for opportunities to let these practices emerge and be praised within this action, so that children know that their whole linguistic and cultural repertoires are valued. For example, you can encourage pupils to use their home languages in the activities and to teach some key concepts to their peers and adult facilitators, or to bring in and include their cultural knowledge into the activities.

Allow children to use multiple forms of participation

It is well known that embodied and arts-based approaches allow pupils to express feelings and ideas that do not always emerge through other channels. Use your imagination when planning the activities and encourage pupils’ participation through multiple and creative forms that go beyond typical school dynamics, usually based on oral or written expression. For example, you can include spaces for drawing as an alternative to writing for those children who are not yet fluent in the school language, or encourage the use of role-plays, games, singing, dancing and other ways of expression that might broaden everyone’s chances for participation.

Give space to local artists to allow children to come into contact with diverse forms of expression

An engaging way to open spaces for pupils’ creativity and participation in this action is by inviting one or more local artists to share their work and engage the pupils in a collaborative artistic performance. This exchange might help pupils to get to know different forms of artistic creation that might be available for them to perform and their affordances for self-expression. In this action, you will find inspirational resources to encourage pupils to express their ideas in creative ways. Indeed, one central activity consists of the design and production of an artistic creation guided by a local artist, and you can find a thorough description of the process and outcomes in our handbook. By the way, this was by far pupils’ favourite part of the action.

Be a model and be part of the reflection

Use this action to reflect on your own linguistic and cultural experiences, and share your story with pupils. For example, before asking children to produce their linguistic biographies through the ‘flower of languages’ (you can find the instructions in this handbook), create your own autobiographical account and share it with pupils, explaining your life trajectory in relation to languages, varieties and cultures. Along with being a model for their reflections, you might be surprised by your own findings!

Carefully guide the activities, so that sensible issues that might emerge can be discussed and critically revised

Don’t be surprised if the intended reflection around linguistic and cultural diversity leads children to express their opinions or concerns around other sensible topics, such as racism and other forms of discrimination. It might also be the case that during the activities they express their own linguistic and cultural prejudices and stereotypes about certain languages, accents or communities. Rather than avoiding these topics, try to be prepared and use them for critical reflection.

Be ready to redirect the discussion of pupils back to the main points

So far, we have recommended to be flexible and let pupils’ interests guide the action. However, there might be times when their initiative leads them far from the main topics and objectives of the proposal, into directions where they might lose the opportunity to reflect on the linguistic and cultural diversity around them. If this is the case, you can have some strategies prepared to bring them back to the topic, for example by sharing a personal experience and asking for their opinion, or by displaying some engaging audiovisual resource that might promote group discussion.

Involve families and other members of the school or the community as much as possible

When planning your activities, think of possible ways to involve pupils’ families and the wider community both in the action processes and in the final outcomes. This can be done by asking pupils to explain or to implement some of the activities at home (for example, they might create the linguistic biography of a family member) and bring some feedback back to the sessions. And, of course, family involvement can be promoted by organizing some type of final presentation for parents, siblings, friends, and the rest of the school and out-of-school community, as we did in our action.

Save some time after each activity and at the end of the project for collective reflection

This might be an important space for connecting the work done and the experiences lived during each session with the main objectives of the action. As in previous tips, you can also be creative here and propose diverse and dynamic forms of critical reflection, so that everyone finds a way to participate (see for example the strategies used by the urban artist in our handbook, or the postcard we used for the last session, where students could write what they had liked the most and what they had shared with their families). If there is not much time in every session for a proper collective reflection, you can use some sort of ‘exit pass’, asking pupils to share one word or brief comment about that day before leaving the room.

It is important to implement this pilot because…
the school domain is one of the key agencies of socialization and represents both a challenging and ideal arena for the children’s integration, as well as their families’ and communities’, into mainstream society. Yet, children with an immigrant or deprived background often have to face many challenges created by educational inequalities, lack of social and emotional wellbeing, inability to use their native/family languages, lack of mutual knowledge and understanding. Children’s voices and opinions are seldom heard and heeded, yet they are the ones who experience first-hand the strengths and weaknesses of educational policies and the impact they have on their future and their lives. The activities of this pilot action will help them and their families voice their needs and ensure that they are heard by the other stakeholders in education: teachers, local, regional and national policymakers.

This pilot action will take place in kindergarten, primary and middle schools with a culturally diverse pupil population ranging from 3 to 14 years of age.

The aim of this pilot action is…
to help children/families/communities find their voice and bring their real needs in education to other stakeholders as well as policymakers at the local, regional and national levels. The activities of this pilot will be co-created by taking a multi-pronged approach based on the whole-child/school, bottom-up, and participatory action research theories. This approach will help integrate the learning dimension with the cultural, social, and emotional sphere thus contributing to promote and enhance inclusion.

Allowing children, families, teachers and communities, especially those with an immigrant background, to express their voice to overcome barriers in education increases their agency and allows them to make their real needs in education visible to decision- and policy-makers.

The co-created activities will focus on the real needs of children with and without an immigrant background in education. They will also contribute to disseminate the objectives of the project and outcomes of the pilot action to a wider audience by:

  • creating videos and animations using different tools and software such as the i-Theatre, Lego bricks, shadow theatre, PowerPoint, Genially, etc.
  • using good and established practices that the schools have already developed successfully
  • collecting written and graphic narratives

Presentation of the repilot My ideal school; the school I would like pilot action

Presentation of the pilot My ideal school; the school I would like

Presentation of the repilot My ideal school; the school I would like pilot action

Special video: Migrant kids' ideal school in Cyprus

Multimedia gallery

Video of the transformation process of a basement at the school into an artistic laboratory

Photos of the pilot activities conducted in the repilot phase, in Cyprus

Gallery of the posters produced to show the different activities carried out at schools