"Our project aims at developing good educational practice in favour of social inclusion among adults, focusing on two main aspects: inclusion of migrants from different religious and cultural backgrounds and inclusion (help to emancipation) of women. We have chosen these two horizontal priorities for a variety of reasons to be explained under the different points:All our schools have the same background: They are adult education centres based in small cities and specifically on working-class areas with a significant percentage of low-skilled labour and unemployment. The environment is also quite multicultural, with the presence of immigrants and ethnic minorities. All of these people share economic and social problems related to their lack of opportunities and access to proper jobs and culture-related activities. In the case of women, their situation is even worse: they tend to occupy the lowest positions and for migrant women this is likely to result in double discrimination: for ethnic as well as for gender reasons. Such a context is complicated and there comes the importance of education and providing with second opportunities as a way to overcome social and economic difficulties. As we have seen in many occasions, if problems of this type are neglected and overlooked, we risk to contribute to the creation of ghettos and the rise of racist and xenophobic movements, as well as the youngsters' involvement in criminal organisations. Therefore, our project is aimed at students who approach our schools in order to obtain the qualifications and/or training that they didn't obtain in the past, due to a number of socio-economic and cultural disadvantages. We are thinking of low-skilled people who need some basic training in order to find a job or to improve their career perspectives. Another group will be immigrants attending our lessons in order to learn our language and often also to acquire basic literacy and numeracy skills. We intend to actively engage 48 of these two types of students in mobilities, even though we would like all our school members to become involved in the project. The objectives of our project are therefore to contribute to facilitating inclusion of all these groups we are confronted with. The idea is a kind of melting pot where all people – regardless of gender or ethnic, religious or cultural background are fully respected on equal footing in society. This will imply enlarging the cultural as well as career prospects of our students and helping hem to fully developing all their talents. Another important aim will be to fight prevailing prejudices, to convince everybody that all human beings enjoy the same human rights and all have talents of different types. Taking part in a European project involving the students will certainly motivate them to continue their studies. They will perceive this project as something their personal engagement and contribution.In oder to achieve these general and ambitious objectives, we will engage the students in a number of activities involving cultural integration and women emancipation through culture-related tasks: study of the situation of women and cultural integration through history, science and literature, with numerous examples depicting the plight of the less-favoured ones, debates and conferences by experts, the preparation of drama plays and short movies in which they have to recreate the life of a disadvantaged person, photo exhibitions, creation of a book containing their compositions and work on the project, etc. We will be using an active, task-based methodology, with all the subjects evolving somehow around the project. The idea is to provide our students with the information, and then make them reflect about it and produce their own materials (whether in the form of a composition, or a power point presentation, or a drama play, etc. ).We are envisaging the following impact and results to this project: - decrease of the percentage of our school drop-outs to around 30%- increase in the percentage of students wishing to continue with their studies after the course completion to 30%- increase of the percentage of students able to communicate in English- growing sensitivity and acceptance of multiculturality. In the long term, we are expecting our project to be meaningful for many people, for developing a sense of European citizenship in our areas, strengthening our teachers' skills, promoting tolerance and empowerment, creating a network of lasting cooperation between different local and international entities, etc.To sum up we may quote Plato, who said almost 2500 years ago: ""I thank God, that I was born Greek and not barbarian, free man and not slave, man and not woman"". This sentence is very interesting because it reveals a society of privileges where prospects in life depend on birth, where you are born and whether as man or as woman. This type of society we want to overcome and we seriously hope that our project"

"Knowledge is now the main engine of economy and social life. The presence, however, of forms of exclusion and inequality raises the problem of how to emancipate citizens from the condition of unavailability of knowledge. The increase in literacy levels among the population of adults, in early school leaving, and in people living a situation of social distress are one of the key demands in nowadays Europe, to which the project intends to respond by carrying out a lifelong education in which the educator must be able to integrate different open and flexible teaching methods for meaningful learning in which the subject is active and responsible in structuring his/her learning path to reach knowledge, knowing how to do and knowing how to be. Operators involved in this project are asked to acquire useful skills to contain, prevent and overcome a problem defined as functional illiteracy. The investment in possible strategies to overcome it represents the main goal for all seven partners of this project. An added value for each teacher is being able to highlight, test, appreciate and value all abilities acquired in any field by his/her students. The increasing globalization of labor and economic relations needs to identify means of ""communication"" of people’s knowledge and know-how, other than simply of qualifications or curricula, which are not always able to prove what people really know and can do. Therefore, it is of fundamental importance to tackle the problem of functional illiteracy and to seek solutions not only in formal education but also in non-formal education. The main target group which the project refers to consists of educators / teachers / tutors / facilitators of each partner Institution who will be involved in the creation of practice communities to develop a teaching model that takes into account two fundamental criteria: the first concerns the passage from knowledge to skills; the second refers to the centrality of the user, the final recipient of the educational action, who must become the active main character of his/her learning path. The secondary target group consists of who needs to “learn to learn” in order to keep up with the rapid changes that mainly characterize the world of work. Adult students who rely on these paths need for the acquired knowledge and skills to be appropriately and fairly considered in all European countries for the required purposes. It is therefore necessary to have the validity of the used methods acknowledged and recognized, to disseminate the achieved results, and to undertake the request for a system of recognition of the skills acquired in contexts different from the formal ones throughout Europe. The partnership consists of seven countries: Italy, Spain, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Poland, Greece and Turkey. All organizations are involved in adult education and mainly work with disadvantaged people. The number of participants varies from organization to organization, however it is assumed that at least 600 people are involved between educators / trainers / tutors and users, ie adults with low skills.The partnership, at this early moment of experimentation, shares the fact that more than the quantity of users involved is worth the quality of the education provided that must be expressed according to an inclusive teaching."