About the project

Background

We wanted to apply for this project because of the fact that xenophobia has increased across European countries due to immigration since 2012. The OECD study results reveal that 7 in 10 respondents have friends from a different religion or have different beliefs than themselves, which increases the chances of witnessing harassment and hatred towards other people and their cultures. It is evident that ethnic minorities and migrants face harassment and discrimination across the EU, despite longstanding EU laws against racism.

That’s why, Europeans, from a young age, need to develop a mindset that fosters understanding and promotes cultural diversity later in their lives. In order to have a healthy society, some social skills need to be adopted at earlier stages of life. Based on the explanations above, the achievement of soft skills to foster empathy and tolerance is needed. We wanted to focus on high school students as they are at the perfect age for exploring their own voice and characteristics. Students need effective treatment solutions to hatred and dicrimination.

They need to have consciousness of being a world citizen, of cultural diversity and of universal values. The more the adolescents get engaged in cultural diversity relations, the less likely they will spawn xenophobic behavior.

Objectives

With sayNOphobia, we want to effectively deal with hatred towards foreigners by facilitating a mindset change in 14-18 year-olds through the use of forum theatres and microlearning. to support actions against intercultural problems like racism and social fears in the EU. We want to nurture specific skills such as tackling radicalization, expression of feelings and cooperation, challenging established perceptions of various cultures and exploring solutions, increasing awareness of intercultural differences, to have better results in communication, social relations, international cultural awareness, and embracing differences.

We would like to combine a beneficial method, microlearning or bite-sized learning, with Forum theatres in order to attain the objectives of this project. Forum Theatre is a form of theatre to explore social justice and relations through different interactive techniques and aims to practice scenarios to empower students by rehearsing solutions and changing the outcome for the better. Microlearning deals with relatively small learning units and involves short-term-focused strategies. Microlearning transmits information through many short courses or modules instead of single long and laborious training. They are perfect ways to reinforce and retain knowledge and facilitate behavior change. This combination will enhance the learning outcome through providing small steps, easy to learn and understandable, to absorb a more critical topic later unconsciously.

Implementation:

SayNOphobia consists of 4 project results and carefully organized activities to complete each of them. The first stage of the project starts with a kick off meeting in Poland and collection of good practices. Kick off meeting will be done for the aim of orienting the project team to the work at hand, decide how everyone will work together, and establish common project goals and check-ins.

Then partners will search and gather previously done good practices in order to fight hatred and hostility towards foreign cultures and people. A report will be generated after gap analysis and final collection of good practices will be created and put into the Saynophobia manual. After the first phase is done, another project meeting will be held in Sarajevo.

Secondly, a training outline and detailed training content for performing forum theatres against xenophobia will be prepared and piloting will be done with associated schools. This way, teachers will receive necessary knowledge and skills for their continuous professional development to prevent and intervene xenophobia in high school students. Teachers will attend LTT mobility at this stage that will be held in Romania by Be You.

Thirdly, partners will develop an E-learning platform for fighting xenophobia. At this stage micro learning content which will prepare students for forum theatre sessions will be designed and delivered to the target group. Content will be tested and piloted with the target group to see impact and revisions will be made until the final version is ready. At this stage students will get together to perform forum theatres with their previously trained teachers and every student will create a feeling journal about their experiences and feelings during performances. These journals will be uploaded to twinspace in the leadership of LIFE4YOU.

Lastly, partners will keep collaborating for the work of creating a guidebook as a product of this project. This guidebook will include all the created resources and experiences during the implementation phase and also will include a small report gathered from student journals to prove how effective the intervention of forum theatre will be. After making revisions, the final guidebook will be ready and made available in several languages. Then final conference of the project will be held in Konya, Turkey.