From the 28st to the 30th of November 2017, Edinburgh, Scotland (UK) hosted the mid-term meeting of the international project “All In”, which is related to the topic of inclusion in educational contexts.
The project lasts 2 years and it involves 8 organizations from 7 different European countries (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy, United Kingdom, Slovenia and Spain).
The project, funded by the European Commission (K2 action of the Erasmus + program), aims at developing and testing training modules which educators and coordinators can use to work on the topic of inclusion.
During this meeting the partners had the opportunity to share the data emerged from a joint research realized in each country. The research addressed three different target groups: youth workers, experts and young people.
It highlights the level of heterogeneity of educational pathways of youth workers regarding inclusion issues and the relevance of the “experience” among the experts. Starting from this point, it was also possible to figure out the most suitable structure of the training course (online ones, residential, etc.) that can allow fully participation of the workers.
For what concerns young people attitude and ability to evaluate inclusive practices, the first doubts came out: the 30% of the group feels that its attitude is not always inclusive, also because they do not think they can evaluate properly inclusive practices. As for the language, that is what they find to be the least problematic: 38% of the young people we asked answered that they are sure they use an inclusive language, whereas the 54% think they are not completely sure but pretty convinced they can use an inclusive language.
These are some of the outcomes and it is easy to understand how much they could be helpful to identify the educational needs and to design an innovative training module that can promote more inclusive educational actions.
For this reason, during the meeting it was also possible to establish a working methodology on the creation of the modules by the team of the partners. Next step will be the definition of the modules before their testing phase.
In this sense, a new meeting will happen in June 2018 in Sofia, Bulgaria which will be followed by the first international training course using the training modules and several local tests by the partners before the effective dissemination at European level in the youth field.
Keep following us in this adventure!
Laura Pierfelici
Vicolocortini 