"PROJECT BACKGROUND: The Louis-Baare-Berufskolleg is a vocational college where students complete their traineeships or obtain general educational qualifications. As a so-called ""European School"" and “School of Individual Student Support” we try to help our students to gain the new skills and competences they need in European and international context. As teachers we continually face the new challenges in the field of education and labour market, which we wanted to tackle together with our partner schools in Poland and Turkey.OUR GOALS:In our project, we intended to improve the measures of individual student support practiced at our schools in order to enhance the skills and opportunities of our students. For this purpose we worked on an educational concept with an inventory, a comparison, optimization and extension of the student support measures at the participating schools in Germany, Poland and Turkey. Through a transnational project implementation, we expected new, innovative insights for our educational work. Together with the participating students we wanted to consider how we can support them individually at acquiring new skills. The students taking part in the transnational project received the opportunity to improve their skills as well as their cultural and political awareness.PARTICIPANTS:In order to carry out the project, an organizational and technical support and participation of many teachers, the school administration and the numerous students of the partner schools was necessary. In the transnational project meetings the number of participants was limited to 5 teachers and in the student activity part to 5 students and 2 tutors per participating school. This enabled the 4 participating schools an effective cooperation and organization of the meetings.ACTIVITIES:In our project activities we compared the School Laws of the individual countries and the EU regulations concerning the individual student support requirements. We exchanged our experiences and already practiced measures, but we also concentrated on such latest popular issues as mindfulness, digitalization or inclusion and discussed their possible implementation in our educational work.The students worked on the topic of individual support and determined what they criticize and appreciate in their own school systems, what their priorities concerning educational and labour market opportunities are and what measures of individual student support could help them. They took part in surveys, produced short films and photos and prepared PowerPoint presentations about their “dream schools” and wishes concerning individual support at school. They had the opportunity to meet students from politically and economically different countries, exchange their views and win new perspectives as well as practice their language and PC skills.LONG-TERM BENEFITS: The long-term benefit can be expressed by the acquisition of new expertise about European educational systems, new skills and requirements and how to support them individually. Moreover our goal was the revision and extension of the measures of individual student support and thus increasing the educational and labour market opportunities of our students. We established sustainable school partnerships - a “spring-board” for new international projects."

CONTEXT/BACKGROUND OF THE PROJECT:Our project “Books can build bridges” opened up opportunities for students to deal with European history and European literature in creating a history book and a literary history of the five participating nations. It was the teachers’ objective was to encourage a European competence among their students that includes a critical view of today’s Europe as well as a sense of tradition.Teachers of five schools, who share educational aims and a strongly pro-European view came together via e-twinning and started a project whose subject contributed considerably to an intellectual advancement of the students and spread the European idea both within the schools and also in the public that was involved in our project.OBJECTIVESOur paramount aim was to enable our students to become active and responsible citizens and to engage with the idea of European unity while maintaining cultural variety in the different parts of Europe. This aim was reached in particular by creating a European history book that dealt with the history of the EU.In order to achieve that aim a number of competences were required.Therefore our project promoted:- German language skills (writing a novel, reading texts and working with them). English was often used in the communication between the students;- Skills in reading and learning (reading texts, writing texts, interpreting scenes from films etc.);- Cultural awareness, historical and political awareness and the ability to use cultural terminology;- General and vocational education and training (preparation for university studies);- Mathematical and scientific competence (collecting and evaluating statistical data)- Digital competence (digital presentation of project results; use of computers to communicate with partners);- Social competence (cooperation of students of the different partner schools).NUMBER AND PROFILE OF PARTICIPANTSSchools from five different countries were involved in our project: apart from the German coordinating school there were schools from Italy, Poland, Hungary and Turkey. All school took part in Comenius projects before.DESCRIPTION OF ACTIVITIESThe student activities demanded intellectual, creative, technological and social skills: Pupils read and worked with European literary and historical texts; they made their own films and wrote their own texts, thus creating new works of art; they used a variety of modern media to gather information and to communicate. In their work and communication with students from the partner schools they learned to work together in a product-oriented way in mixed-nationality groups.CARRYING OUT THE PROJECTIn the months between the working meetings in the different countries the students worked in groups specifically formed for the different project activities. E-twinning and e-mails were used to plan and coordinate the different steps and to record the results of their work that were presented and finished during the next meeting. Moreover, the students mostly stayed in families during their visits to the other countries, they also spend some days together in at a boarding school. Thus they found out about everyday life in different countries, and they also took part at lessons at school.RESULTS AND IMPACT Our results are books in both digital form and print:1.A literary history of the participating countries by young people for young people2. Creative products dealing with literature: booktrailers, Comics made of fairy tales and legends, modernized fairy tales, a calender that encourages reading3. Project novel “Journey through Europe”4. European history book5. Historical tours of the towns6. Texts of the poetry slam7. Video film of the poetry slam8. Artwork: “Angel of three cultures” 9. Creative artworks made with books10. Presentation: A short philosophy of language, reading and writing: “Looking at limits”.POTENTIAL LONG-TERM BENEFITS- Implementation of project results into school curricula (History, Language and Literature, Philosophy, Religion)- Books in schools and public libraries; digital books on our project homepage, products on the European project results platform

"AAC @ school for social inclusion has the general objective of supporting the inclusion of disadvantaged students in school education paths through a specific methodology which unfortunately is not yet widespread in European and national school contexts, the Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). To do this, the project activities are focused on strengthening teachers' abilities and supporting them in tackling diversity in the classroom, adopting innovative practices. Managing diversity today is a very important skill, mainly because of the increase in the number of immigrants in European countries, because it helps tackle early school leaving (ESL) and disadvantage. For this reason, AAC @ school offers a new tool for education, allowing success even for those students with communication difficulties.The project produced the following intellectual outputs:1) RESEARCH AND STATE OF ART (in English). The document is divided in 3 sections: - Best practices in AAC methodology collected by partners; - International best practices resulting from desk research of the University of Basque County - International context report, revising legislation and measures dedicated to inclusion of students with special needs.2) AAC@SCHOOL TRAINING PROGRAMME (in English, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, German, Slovenian, Bulgarian), divided into explanatory MODULES completed by teaching materials and videos, allows to learn how to use the AAC in the different contexts covered in the project. The goal was to maximize knowledge already available. Then the partners designed, tested and validated the training model during the second phase of the project activities. The proposed teaching objectives include creating awareness, transmitting knowledge and assisting teachers to develop and use the AAC methodology within their classes according to different age groups and to support people with communication needs, including refugees and migrants.3) TOOLKIT: AAC FRIENDLY SCHOOL (in English, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, German, Slovenian, Bulgarian) was conceived and created to teach how to transform school environments, and beyond, into inclusive places also for those who have serious problems of permanent or temporary communication. The tools allow the use AAC tools, build and use pictograms to label school and social spaces.4) A proposal for BOOKLET FOR REFUGEES AND NEWCOMERS.5) The software ""AAC COMMUNICATOR"", developed by SUPSI (associated partner).The consortium that operates in this project is composed of 9 partners (plus an associated partner) and it is greatly enriched by their diversity, they represent different backgrounds and countries, dimensions, type but they are all united because of the desire to support the development of the AAC methodology into school education. The partnership includes schools (3), NGOs / social enterprises (4) who work daily in educational / school settings, 2 universities (1 partner and 1 associate partner) and an NGO representing a network of EU teachers.Keeping always the school as the main educational provider and at the center of this action, we aim to create an educational community / network with other actors such as families, libraries, sports clubs, youth associations, museums and even public transport to promote a transversal use of AAC methodologies . Such an integrated approach that embraces the wider life context of disadvantaged students will strongly strengthen the inclusion of the educational offer provided."