<< Objectives >>VI children lack access to a wide range of literature needed in order to be able to build awareness of the world around them and thus achieve emotional, linguistic and intellectual levels. Tacticos aims to provide high quality and well tested guidelines for designing and producing cost–effective tactile books and tactile illustrations and improve (inter)national cooperation in this field. By doing so we aim to foster the development of literacy and concept building skills of VI children.<< Implementation >>The 3 essential project activities are:1. Writing of guidelines for producing high quality, cost-effective tactile books and illustrations, preceded by preliminary research and setting up of methodology and terminology2. Testing the guidelines. A set of tactile books and illustrations will be produced according to the guidelines and will be tested with VI children. 3. Dissemination activities including training program for VI professionals and caretakers for ‘reading’ tactile materials<< Results >>The main results of this project are:-Desktop research -Glossary of terms -Guidelines for designing and producing tactile illustrations and books-Recommendation report for cooperation VI experts and printing houses-Testing plan and evaluation report-1-3 tactile book -20-30 tactile illustrations for concept development -Dissemination plan, project website-Training programme and tools for VI professionals and parents/caretakers of VI children-Network campaign-Promotion events

In our society, when we talk about handicap, we often think about motor disability or intellectual disability - Even if this population is the most important part among disabled people, we do not have to forget other kind of disabilities, which make the autonomy and social inclusion and participation very complicated and sometimes not realistic. This project is talking about children with visual impairment, and especially very young children for whom our organisations try to give social inclusion and social participation for a better quality of life and to make them citizens in its own right. Our organisations are working on early intervention, from the early age of these children. This is very important for a better assimilation of what will give social inclusion and social participation. We support these very young children from birth, and also their families and relatives, in all the aspects of their life. This support is provided to each child as a whole : body skills development, autonomy in daily life, in the movings, in school pathway, and psychological support, and by a multidisciplinary team composed of social workers, professionals on rehabilitation, orthoptists, occupational therapists, psychologists.This support at very young age (often before 3 years old) is crucial for the future of the child. After long experiences of support, we know that a lack a this age is providing teenagers without autonomy, and without social inclusion and participation. The objective of our project is to favor the exchange of practices between different organisations in Europe to put in advance the methodologies, tools, and support provided, either to consider them as a good practice for blind or partially sighted children, either to admit that some practices are not the best for these children. Such exchanges in Europe will enable the professionals to improve their knowledge in the support of these children, for their benefit in the aim to improve the autonomy, the social inclusion and social participation of blind and partially sighted people, as citizen in its own right. Participants involved in this project are professionals including social workers, professionals on rehabilitation (mobility instructors, daily living instructors), psychologists, occupational therapists, orthoptists. Activities will include 2 mobilities. The first mobility in Angers (France) will enable participants to improve their knowledge about the different practices in Europe, but will also enable workshops and visits, especially on animal mediation. The second mobility in Vienna (Austria) will introduce different clinical cases for a good comprehension of best practices on early intervention, but also workshops dedicated to Echolocation, activity for the auntonomy of children with visual impairment. Out of these 2 mobilities, a steering committee will organise the different activities - we will use online system (skype, zoom) to keep contact with all the partners, and to provide all the information required to prepare the mobilities. As results, the partnership will discover and exchange good practices by sharing everyone's experiences in order to communicate them to professionals and partners (parents, schools, crèches, etc.) but also we will think about and identify strategies for supporting very young children: what are the areas to be tackled? at what stages of life? how to transmit them, what pedagogy to use? what tools at our disposal? What tools should be invented? All these results will be provided in formal presentations, as much for the presentation of practices, as for clinical cases, which will provide a guide on the practicies concerning early intervention in Europe.The impact of this project is to improve the social inclusion and participation, as well as the professional inclusion, of young children with visual impairment - this is an investment from the early age for a big impact at adulthood.

Brains for Europe Project is an initiative that comes up from the inside of the educational centres and is conceived as a solid contribution to the ongoing pedagogical renovation both thematically and methodologically. The aim of B4E is the introduction of learning in neurosciences (one of the most promising scientific areas, to which the European Commission is nowadays paying a growing attention) in educational centres, through the creation inside them of neuroscience classrooms that will open a new operative frame which we define as metaschool. Unlike top-down conventional learning, metaschool implies another type of learning, much more horizontal or even bottom-up, led by students of the different centres, in which the very students are those who decide and lead their own learning and – using the suggested tools – help to offer it to the rest of the fellow students of their own centre and to those of the other countries’ centres involved in the project. B4E has got 9 formal partners altogether: 1 foundation (and hospital), 2 companies, 5 educational centres and a mutual insurance company dedicated to education and rehabilitation in disability. Four of the partners are from Spain and the rest belongs to Turkey, Poland, Romania, France and Iceland. The countries involved are therefore 6. One has to add the involvement of 3 non-formal partners: 3 European networks such as NICE Foundation, ENVITER and HIPEN. Among the main activities of the Project, it appears in the first place a teacher training of those who will take part later in the coordination of the neuroscience classrooms (neuromentors). Once constituted a neuroscience classroom, it will be tackled in it different subjects related to the brain, to the relationship between neurosciences and technology, and to the mental disease (the question of education and rehabilitation in disability will be underlined) making the students to get opened, among other things, to the STEM Learning, to the critical thinking, to the learning to learn and to the neurological health. Students’ approach to these subjects will have an active character articulated according to the answers to concrete challenges they are going to be posed. Students will work their materials and will expose them in TED-like talks, that they will share with the rest of participants but also with the rest of the centre’s students through an e-platform. Young people taking part in the Project, among 12 and 16 years old, will get identified with it and with their role as influencers that will become an example and a motivation for the rest of their fellow students. They will be the axis around which our metaschool will spin. The idea of generating a metaschool inside a conventional educational centre, in coordination with it and profiting the channels afforded by new technologies and network communication forms provides an effective pedagogical novelty reinforced at the same time by the matter in question, decisive when it comes to inform the new pedagogical theories on the details of learning. Direct impact of B4E will be performed on 4 ambits: 1) On the directly involved students, that will take part of a different type of education, on which they have the power of decision, founded on their possibility of discovering and on their own intellectual effort, and that gets multiplied immediately through their own projection as Project-disseminators. At the same time, B4E is designed to have a great influence on students’ professional vocations, and particularly on female professional vocations. 2) On the centre’s students in general, to which it will lead to a fascinating ambit of knowledge and to which the Project will also offer a new pedagogical proposal. 3) On the centres that take part, first of all, through their teachers’ staffs, that will exercise a new and relevant pedagogical task that will contribute to offer them new possibilities and perspectives. 4) Project’s diffusion will multiply its impact at the social level, in the different countries and in the EU in general. Among its many long-term benefits, our B4E Project, including in its whole not only the urban reality but also the rural one, offers channels to take advantage of all ambits’ European youth’s talent, regardless of how limited are their opportunities in their concrete regions. That will make the difference to sound out aspects of an European collective intelligence and in the long run the Project could maybe serve as a model for future projects and make that young people can recognise themselves more easily as citizens of the same political union, the European one, reinforcing their European identity. In the end, knowing our brain is the best way of knowing ourselves and the environment we have created. Our project aims to offer the students a frame from which articulate this knowledge and set the creative bases of the very neurosciences’ evolution and of the value of its knowledge applied in the future.

In our society, deaf children are confronted to the problem of communication with all their surrounding. The technology of cochlear implant gives the possibility to deaf children to access to the comprehension of hearing people and so also to access to oral language to be understood. This technology is used all around Europe, not at the same level, because of the cost, but more and more children can benefit from the cochlear implants. Specialised institutions for deaf ensure the rehabilitation process necessary to improve the comprehension and oral language (multidisciplinary team composed of ENT specialists, neuropsychologists, speech therapists, social workers, etc. )In the same time, the development of this technology has revealed that 30% of the beneficaries can not develop oral language, and so revealed neurolinguistic disorders. It is very difficult to assess and to quantify some of these disorders. The work of specialists requires significant multidisciplinary cooperation and regular observations. This project will enable this collaborative work to give at EU level a better understanding of practices, explorations and materials used in the support of these children. Even though the objective is to produce a protocol of assessment and rehabilitation for a multidisciplinary team to improve the support of these children, this step of explorations is very important to get the good knowledge of the situation in Europe. We will develop two main times of training for participants, one of this event will be to understand the explorations of all the partners and to introduce the question of language disorders to define a consent on the definition. The 2nd one will be more focused on clinical cases, giving a good comprehension of the situation. That will provide a presentation of practices and explorations at EU level, with the implementation of a canadian partner, who get better results in the development of oral language. Their practicies and the North American situation will provide an added-value in the comprehension. In Montreal, Institut Raymond Dewar which follows the children with cochlear implants has pointed out only 3 situations of problems of development of oral language among the 108 deaf children implanted between 2015 and 2018. Such results are great opportunities for our partnership to know more about what is working practically. 20 participants will attend each training event - they will be representative of the question in their organisations and there will be ENT specialists, neuropsychologists, psychologists, social workers, speech therapists, specialised teachers, all the professionals which form the multidisciplinary team in the support of these children. The outcomes of the project will give the possibility to continue in the development of a protocol of assessment and rehabilitation for professionals (participants mentioned) working with these children, in a development of innovation, for the benefit of deaf children and their parents.