 Hello, good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today to the webinar called Welcoming Newly Arrived Refugees in the Classroom. According to the UNCHR, more than 5.4 million refugees have fled Ukraine since the war started, and mostly women and children. These families have joined the thousands of already-refugees and migrants at their arrival where also welcome in the European classrooms. The challenges are important and urgent to be effectively taken. That is why from the School Education Gateway, the major educational portal of the European Commission, where you will find carefully selected resources and information relevant, have organized this webinar today. In the School Educational Gateway, you can also find the European Toolkit for Schools, where you will find concrete resources for improving the collaboration within, between and beyond schools, with the view of enabling all children and young people to succeed in a school. When schools and other educational institutions welcome migrants and newly arrived refugees, classrooms become more culturally diverse. Quite often, this diversity, understood in a very wide sense, goes unnoticed or even it is perceived as a problem or as a challenge, that teachers are expected to solve. If institutional support structures and how to teach in a diverse classroom are fragile, teachers tend to act in accordance with their own views and pedagogical experience. When dealing with a culturally diverse classroom, good intentions are not always enough, and rather often, pedagogical approaches that emerge from teachers' genuine concerns with their pupils ends up having detrimental effects on their learning and well-being. That is why we need to draw from well-contrasted experience, from research, and this is what this webinar is about. And here we are going to discuss the importance of acknowledging and, most importantly, and recognizing cultural diversity in the classroom while standing to the complex needs of refugee children. So in doing so, we have four speakers that are going to be with us today. The first one will be Cosmin Nada, who is an expert on diversity in education and a researcher at the Centre for Research and Intervention in Education in Oporto, who will approach the distinction between intercultural and monocultural teachers, highlighting the importance of adapting pedagogical practices to the needs of diverse pupils. Whilst acknowledging that all pupils are different in their own way, particularly vulnerable groups like refugee children require extra attention. Sara Amadasi will follow and she is a research fellow in the Department of Studies and Language and Culture at Unimor, and representative of the Horizon 2020 Child App Project that will present how the geologic facilitation can be a tool to promote migrant children's participation in the classroom and to enhance conditions of hybrid integrations, which concerns all children. Going from Italy to Slovenia, we will hear the experience of another Horizon 2020 Project by the hand of Matija Setmak and Barbara Gornik from the Science and Research Centre of COPER and representatives of the MiCREATE project, who will be presenting the main findings and recommendations together with a series of practical and concrete tools that teachers can use in the process of welcoming refugees' children in teaching in diverse classrooms. So now we are going to give the floor to Cosmin, Yonud Nada, the floor is yours, Cosmin. Thank you so much, Teresa. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for being here on a Friday afternoon. I apologize already for my voice because I was sick for a few days and I'm still not fully recovered, but I hope that you can all hear me well. I'm going to share my presentation now so that we are on the same page and here it is. I believe that you are able to see it well. And today I would like to reflect with you and for us to reflect together on the issue of diversity in education. A very brief presentation that Teresa already made that I come from the Centre for Research and Intervention in Education from the University of Porto. I also act as a member of the editorial board of the European Toolkit for Schools, the main organizer for today's webinar, which is hosted on the School Education Gateway. And I also coordinate the NESET network, the network of experts working on the social dimension of education and training. And today I'm going to draw mainly on my experience as a lecturer of the elective course, Diversity in Education, Migration and Multiculturalism, that I teach at my university for the bachelor degree in Educational Sciences. I would like us to start our discussion today from this short excerpt by a text from Dina Nairi called A Grateful Refugee, which was published in The Guardian newspaper. And Dina shares with us her experience of being a six-year-old migrant. And she mentions, in 1985, when I was six years old, my family left our home in Ishafan for several months to live in London. The move was temporary, a half-hearted stab at immigration. Nonetheless, I was enrolled in school. In Iran, I had only attended nursery, never school, and I spoke only Farsi. At first, the children were welcoming, teaching me English words using toys and pictures. But within days, the atmosphere around me had changed. Years later, I figured that this must have been how long it took them to tell their parents about the Iranian kid. After that, a group of boys met me in the yard each morning and pretended to play, pummeled me in the stomach. They followed me in the playground and shouted gibberish, laughing at my dumbfounded looks. A few weeks later, two older boys pushed my hand into a door jump and slammed it shut on my little finger, favoring it at the first segment. I was rushed to the hospital, carrying a piece of my finger in a paper napkin. The segment was successfully reattached. This is, I believe, an excerpt that doesn't require much comments from us. It's just a little bit to set a tone of our discussion and to reflect about what can be the experience of a migrant child of a six-year-old in a European school in this particular case. About refugee children and young people in education, we are going to talk in detail today. We have, as Teresa mentioned already, compiled a series of relevant resources that you can use. We are going to share the links in the chat as well. But I would like to bring the discussion a little bit backwards in this sense and take a step back and reflect. And I think we can reflect on the issue of diversity in education more broadly. And in order to do that, I'm bringing you a video from Brazil, an example that we can use. And this video is focused on medicalization of childhood and education, which is not the topic of our discussion. But you will see it's very relevant to think the issue of diversity in education. And we are not going to watch the video because it is in Portuguese with no subtitles. But I'm going to briefly describe what we can see in this video. So we have the teacher that you can see depicted here in this image that sits at her desk and starts reading the names of some of her students one by one and describing them. And she goes on telling us, Julia, he has mental health issues. He is being treated. I discussed his case with a psychologist and I didn't understand exactly what is wrong with him. But it's mental health issues, she tells us. Then she goes on, there's you. His main problem is memory. And I think he would need a neurologist. Actually, many children here would urgently need a neurologist. Ed Wilson is another case who needs a professional, perhaps a psychologist to run some tests and figure out what is wrong with him because the boy's mood shifts all the time. It seems like his personality is unstable. And it gets even worse. Mauricea, as I understood, she has some health issues, but she's the type of child who, in this teacher's opinion, is never going to learn. Pedro is very rebellious. He has a very aggressive personality. He's unhappy. He's angry. And she says, I think the problem is the family because I heard that all the family is like that. And the video goes on and the teacher basically presents us the entire classroom and none of the children are in good mental health, or none of the children are ideal students in the vision of this teacher. So what can we withdraw from these fictitious and tragic comic situation from this video, this example that I'm giving you, is that the teacher presents here a tendency of ascribing negative characteristics to each individual pupil, of course, and an individual-centered approach where factors such as medical conditions, personality traits, or family background are used to explain learning difficulties. And the possibility of having, for instance, unengaging classes or perhaps of children being in an unsafe learning environment or the pedagogical strategies being inadequate, that is never considered. It's always this individual personality or other types of individual background that she points out. So the teacher seems to be seeking an envisioned ideal pupil who does not exist, that becomes clear by the end of the video, and deems the other students unteachable. So I think this video is a clear example of the failure in acknowledging the diversity that all of us who teach have in our classroom. So diversity in education is most often cultural diversity is seen as cultural diversity when we have students from different countries, when we have students from different ethnic groups or who speak different languages. In other cases, we consider diversity as being students that have different socio-economic backgrounds, and they study all in the same school and in the same classroom. But also, and this becomes clear from this video example that I gave you, diversity means having students with different needs, means having students with different life trajectories, and having students with different interests, aspirations, and dreams. So what I presented you in this example is the fact that we often have in our educational systems and in our educational practice, deficit views. And deficit views mean that when we have diversity in the classroom and we identify it, because that is not always the case, sometimes we deal with diversity and we don't even acknowledge it. But when we do, usually that becomes a problem. That becomes a problem that needs to be solved. Of course, not in an exaggerated and tragicomic way as depicted in this video, but that is often the mindset that we end up reproducing. So problem-oriented views in which the pupils who differ from the ideal type are seen as carriers of numerous deficits that must be corrected are also deficit views. So this often leads to questionable pedagogical approaches that then might lead to loss of motivation, school disengagement, eventually dropout. And when that happens, they are usually coupled with what we call a blind student perspective. So when dropout happens or disengagement happens, then we could say very easily, oh, of course, that student was very rebellious, was very angry, was this or that, but not considering the wider picture. Then the issue of assimilation is very important when we discuss diversity and when we discuss education of migrants and refugees, of course, because deficit views are often linked to assimilation ideals, where the expectation is that pupils who are perceived as different, and here migrant and refugee children especially, are the ones who need to adapt to the local context, while host educational institutions can simply remain unchanged. And here we can look at different examples. For instance, when pupils do not speak the language of teaching, that is automatically transformed into a major issue. It doesn't matter if our migrant students speak one, two, three other languages fluently, because they don't speak the right language, that becomes a problem. Or when pupils are not familiar with the local academic culture, and then we expect them to get familiar to it, to engage with our own academic culture, and we never question that perhaps there are elements in our own academic culture that we could change as well, based on the example of, based on the examples that these students from different backgrounds and from different countries bring to us. So a fundamental condition for an institutional switch from assimilationist stances to a more multicultural perspective is to stop regarding difference as a deficit, and to instead address diversity as an educational resource. Of course, this is something that is not very easy to do, but it is indeed very important in order to work with diversity in our classrooms. And as I have been explaining, all classrooms end up being diverse. So I would like now to bring your attention to this model that was developed by some colleagues from my university, namely, Luisa Kurzdahl and Stephen Stover. And they present us this idea of the monocultural and the intercultural teacher. And of course, as you can imagine, the monocultural teacher is the one who usually reproduces this deficit and assimilationist views and is not able to deal with the diversity in the classroom. So some features of the monocultural teacher are this teacher is usually scientifically competent teacher and masters disciplinary content and the packages of the subjects, values acquisition of universal knowledge and cognitive development through learning. For this teacher, school is a neutral field of knowledge acquisition. This teacher also emerges as a source as a transmitter of knowledge and designs the teaching for the middle point for the average. And usually students are represented for this teacher in homogeneous groups. Also, this teacher is very much concerned about students' difficulties. So he or she are always looking to identify learning handicaps and difficulties. And what frames the activity or the intentions of these teachers are psychological and biological explanations for difficulties at school that pupils might have. So very much aligned with the example that I gave you from the video. Then is a teacher who contributes to the construction of the ideal student and uses various motivation tools and compensatory formative assessments. So the implication what moves often the pedagogical action here is to understand students' existing handicaps. So very familiar picture after what I just presented. The intercultural teacher, on the other hand, is a teacher who is more vulnerable to doubt. The objective of the education is actually to shatter the teacher's own security and own knowledge and to question the causes of more or less positive results obtained by the students. At the theoretical level, it is important for the intercultural teacher to value the role of the school in the success and failure of the students, which is something that we, of course, did not see in the previous example. The teacher, intercultural teacher in this case, is able to investigate social cultural characteristics of the context, is interested in analyzing problems arising from power relations at school and understanding the school as a place of conflictual practices of intersection of different powers, interests, and values. And as we know, that is one of the best descriptions of a school. Teachers, intercultural teachers, are able to investigate also the diversity that they have in the classroom. So first, to take into account that they have that diversity and to investigate it. They identify and understand characteristics that inform pupil heterogeneity. They accept and use difference as a resource. Intercultural teachers are also able to identify and analyze learning problems, so they put themselves into almost the hat of a researcher. So they question the appropriateness of content and methods and materials, and they want to understand if they suit the population they work with. So they differentiate the teaching. Of course, when we have diversity in the classroom, we have to have diverse pedagogical approaches as well. So as a result, they design flexible work proposals and plans. So here we can see from this framework of the monocultural and intercultural teacher that I'm presenting you is more complex than this. I just selected a few elements to discuss today, but we can see that the monocultural teacher is very much along the lines of the deficit views and the assimilation ideals and the intercultural teacher more into the consideration of diversity and also acting upon that diversity and rendering it a resource. So you might be wondering if you are a monocultural teacher or an intercultural teacher. Actually, I think that these categories are not to be understood in complete separation. So it is not that somebody is a monocultural teacher entirely or an intercultural teacher entirely, but I think it's a matter of a continuum. So in our own practices sometimes, when we never experienced a particular situation before, we might have an attitude or we might engage in a pedagogical practice that is very much monocultural and in other occasions, we can also be aligned with the intercultural model. So it is a matter of continuously building our experience and our teaching and again becoming researchers of our own classrooms and then moving along these axes and I believe mostly towards the right end and towards becoming intercultural teachers. So now based on this approach and this step back that I invited you to take, let's think and let's answer to this question, how to become an intercultural teacher and welcome refugee children. So becoming an intercultural teacher is not important only for teachers who have migrant and refugee children in their classrooms as noted before. I think it was very obvious that even apparently homogeneous classrooms are diverse if we make an effort to notice that diversity that this is a very important element. In other words, leaning towards a more intercultural pedagogy is beneficial for all students regardless of their migratory background. So we often hear in ideological debates that you know all these multicultural ideals are like a left-wing agenda or something like that. Actually what research shows us is that intercultural pedagogies are indeed beneficial even in classrooms where we do not have the type of cultural diversity that you might think about. So none of our children could have a migratory background and it would still be relevant to reinforce an intercultural pedagogy in the sense that we are going to deal better with the different needs, the different aspirations, the different expectations, the different trajectories of our students. So an intercultural pedagogy is beneficial to all students because it fosters diversity, respect, communication, well-being, recognition and most importantly citizenship. It teaches citizenship values like tolerance, engagement, participation and so on. So while we acknowledge that diversity is a trait of every classroom regardless of the migratory background of the pupils it is also important to acknowledge that migrant and especially refugee pupils present particular trajectories and particular needs and there it is very important to consider migration processes and migration processes and trajectories are extremely complex and they bring several consequences and especially in the case of forced migration which is the case of refugee children they often bring consequences linked to confusion or trauma. At the same time it's also important in our teaching practice not to make assumptions. So for instance imagine that all refugee children are heavily traumatized and require intensive therapy just because they are refugees. Again migratory trajectories can be very different, very diverse and different children might require a different type of support or perhaps not even the support that we might initially think about as in this case I was mentioning therapy in the case of refugee children. So migratory and life trajectories are singular and need to be understood in their complexity and here I quote Franco Ferrarotti who tells us that a person is never an individual it would be better to call him or her a singular universe. I think this is a very strong word and a very strong observation a very powerful observation that Ferrarotti makes here that individuals are singular universes so you we can understand how complex are their realities, how complex are their experiences, their ideals, their needs, their trajectories. So we have to regard them as singular universes in that sense. And then another important element when welcoming refugee children is also to actively observe and manage peer-to-peer relations because we want to enhance well-being for all. Even if we have an intercultural approach to our classroom other peers might not have that approach as you as you could see six-year-old children can be very aggressive and based on the assumptions that they hold about their colleagues can end up in engaging in not very good behavior as we saw at the beginning with the example of the article the newspaper article and last it is important to be mindful that when implementing an intercultural approach to teaching and learning you might experience some resistance because there are wider societal forces for instance systemic racism and scholars that have been working with this topic keep warning us that there are other forces that even when teachers have good intentions the system is structured in a rather monocultural way they do not allow us to take care of the diversity that we have in our classrooms and I think the best way to surpass this limitation is to engage in a whole school approach where intercultural and diversity approaches should go beyond the classroom they should include parents they should include other school actors and the entire school community and I think this is what I wanted to share with you today and I am a little bit above my time because I am counting my own time but I just want to leave you with this note for more practical examples you can go to the school education gateway and I'm going to share the link in the chat where you will find these resources that Teresa has mentioned and of course refer to the European toolkit for schools and the European toolkit for schools as you might know is a platform for the promising practices that are being implemented in schools all over Europe and beyond and that can be very inspiring for you when thinking about these issues of migrant children refugee children and diversity issues in education thank you very much thank you Cosmin I think that all the comments in the chat are raising and saying that this has been very clarifying so thank you for providing us this introductory note to the next speakers so now we are going to move from Portugal to Italy again so Sara Madassi who is a research fellow in the Department of Studies and Language and Culture at the University of Modena in Reggio Emilia will be presenting on the child app project her research interests concern the promotion of children's participation in intercultural communication and transnational migrations and together with Professor Adrienne Holiday she's the author of the book making sense of the intercultural finding the centred threats published in rollage so Sara the floor is yours thank you thank you very much thank you Teresa good afternoon so I'm here to tell you something more about child app who is an Horizon 2020 project it's coordinated by Professor Claudio Baraldi in the Department of Studies on Language and Culture University of Modena in Reggio Emilia and this is the consortium three of these partners are Research Institute of Research partners and the other seven are partners in which the research was carried out in their countries so the general aims of child app they are mainly two the first one is to investigate the possibilities and opportunities of children having a migration background to participate in processes that can change their social and cultural conditions of hybrid integration later on I will go back to this concept of hybrid integration and I will say something more the second aim is to propose practical methodologies and tools to support and improve practices of hybrid integration in the education system and also to promote dialogue and to promote agency of children having a migration background but not only children having migration background three main concepts of child app are facilitation agency and hybrid integration so what do we refer to when we talk about facilitation facilitation is a dialogic form of communication it means that while doing facilitation there is a challenge the the hierarchy of roles and expectations of the education system are challenging challenged and the the roles between adults and children usually common in the education system are challenged so children are supported in their personal expression in their personal stories in telling their personal stories and this is this means sorry to promote their agency agency is a form of participation which is based on the choices of action that are available to children so through these actions by choosing different actions children are active in promoting a change which concern their social and cultural conditions facilitating hybrid integration means to produce forms of hybrid integration which are based on the interlacements of several narratives the different narratives that children want to tell and that concern their personal cultural trajectories their personal stories hybrid integration here it is is based on the mixing of facilitation and agency facilitation and agency leads to a production of narratives in classroom communication and these narratives reach the environment because they they they bring to the classroom a variety they present to the classroom a variety of situations and a variety of personal stories it is also important to say that within child up the idea of hybrid identity is different from the idea of children just having a different culture cultures or having access to different cultural identities because identity is not cultural identity is not perceived as something which is refined which characterize the the individual always and in all situations but as something which is constructed contingently which is fluid and so that changes on the basis of the interactional needs and the personal needs of the participants and in this case of children so after some information about the theoretical framework I say a couple of words about the methodology because child up applied a mixed method research so we delivered questionnaires we collected also audio and video recordings of school activities and focus groups and interviews with children and professionals were carried out were carried on professionals include teachers mediators and social workers and the research was included the schools from preschool and higher secondary schools these are some of the number of the participants to the research so we involved almost four thousand children more than two thousand parents and more than four hundred teachers in seven countries which are Belgium Finland Germany Italy Poland Sweden and UK we recorded two hundred almost more than two hundred activities in classroom and we also audio recorded some meetings mediation meetings between teachers and parents and in some of these meetings also children attended so what's the relevance of child up for migrants and refugees through child up facilitation was proposed as a method and through the method of facilitation agency becomes is recognized as an active way through which children can change can contribute I can take choices concerning changes of their personal conditions and the ability of the personal stories is giving relevance to these hybrid hybridity is a way to foster to announce the inclusion in schools and community especially because the ability of the personal stories is the ability of the personal stories of every child not just migrant or refugees children and also mediation and interpreting was conceived as a way to facilitate children's agency okay now I would like to show you two empirical example of interactions that we recorded so in a couple of minutes I will I will present to you these excerpts the first one is taken from a primary school in London and it's a discussion about personal experiences and family memories of war the narratives produced by children and especially one child which is M1 of course we deleted all the name and we just included codes these narrative influence the developments these narratives influence the development of the conversation the second excerpt was recorded in an Italian secondary school and the activity that was done and recorded remotely because of the pandemic consisted in producing narratives or relations conflict and inclusion in the classroom and children were asked to produce some drawings and to present these drawings to the classroom and then to start with a discussion so now I have to go out from this presentation to share with you the extract because they are quite long and it wasn't possible to include them in the powerpoint can you see the extract yes great okay so I'm not going to read everything because it's very long but I just to give you the context I will read the first turns so a group work has just ended and M1 is presenting is presenting what's the group discussed about and he says that from M2 point of view you know how England is a very first war country sometimes they want more than they have so they take from poor countries which have good resources no offense but England is like a first world country but it isn't well resourced in like food and other stuff so they take from different countries so people started to think that they didn't want to do that so that's how war broke out so this is the participant TM means teacher and is a male the others are participants M stands for male male number one so is a child and F stands for female one or two and is a female and always a child so here a discussion between the teacher and M1 starts and M1 in turn three introduce the topic of war in his own family's country which is Sierra Leone and he says like in my country in my family's country Sierra Leone so the teacher adds a comment and then move to a question which is very important because with the teacher with this question open the floor to M1 narrative so he asks and some people are trying to keep it to themselves and that's how the war break lose so M1 goes on with his narrative turn six is a very long turn of the teacher and you can see it it doesn't produce a good reaction from from the children but in turn eight the teacher again intervenes to say something to ask a question in this turn he admits that he doesn't know the the date of the start of the war in Sierra Leone and he asks these questions to to the students so he says that war was probably I don't know do you know so in this way he's giving the possibility to the student to contribute to the knowledge construction together with the group and the classroom so in turn nine M1 says it was 1997 because that's what my family was telling me about and again the teachers ask something and of 1997 to children do you know how long it's spent for my mom said it was something like seven five years you can see in turn 12 that the teachers the teacher doesn't comment M1 claims with an evaluation with an evaluation of what M1 said he just repeat what M1 said so he says seven five years and then add a comment which has nothing to do with any kind of evaluation to M1 claims the turns goes on and again in turn 19 intervenes another another student intervenes he is M3 and he says Mr in Afghanistan my granddad always says that they tried to get I think resources or something they said no but then it was a war a long time before this one I think it was for less than 20 years and 1,500 people died again the teacher says nothing I mean he doesn't evaluate the the comment of M3 and he says but again it's a word about natural resources by the sound of things and money so what's driving these they goes on by commenting these events and I try to go a bit faster in turn 34 and 35 in turn 34 M1 says exactly the same as Sierra Leone and in turn 35 the teacher just repeat what M1 just said with no any kind of educative evaluation in turn 36 M1 intervenes again any comments by saying but they didn't have their independence taken like Afghanistan I think my that they go there that they got their independence in like 1970 70 something and in turns 38 39 40 and 41 something good happens because children here are moving from one intervention to the other without the the teachers giving them the floor just autonomously they take the floor and they comment and again and lastly in turn 42 the teacher asked confirmation on what he's saying to M6 so he says they have been at work for ages over who owns which bit of the country Kosovo and Serbia have a day M6 so she gives he gives again the knowledge production to the students the second excerpt is different and much shorter because here the girl is just explaining her feelings about the drawings that she just produced and but again the intervention of the facilitator is very important because she gives the floor to the girls to express herself completely so in turn three the girls start to explain about to to make an explanation of their drawing and she says so well so practically there is an important date 2017 which is when I met my best friend then there is a house which is in Manila with three people which would be my grandparents and me who practically they are the most important people because they are like family like my second family like my parents because they raised me as a child so for me they are parents the facilitator intervenes just by saying sure and so the floor again is led to the girl and then well there is a heart that means that for me they are family is the most important thing that the things that comes first nothing I finished here the facilitator intervenes to comment but again also this facility facilitator doesn't evaluate at all the intervention of the girl she just limits herself to say you have been very clear so she makes an appreciation of what the girl just said therefore the family also the grandparents because they are all those who have been close to you and have helped you to grow so she formulates she summarizes what the girl just said and the girl replied yes and then in turns in turn nine the girl goes on she says yes the people who have always been close to me in the difficult moment I mean in fact my best friend has been a very important person who has always been close to me always always so for me she is the sister that I'm a sister that I lost when I was little a child she was practically my twin sister that I lost so she's like my sister because she has always been close to me and she supports me in everything she's very precious it's very nice the facilitator replies so again she's appreciating the effort for the the emotional explanation that the girl said and did and then she she thanked the girl thank you f6 thank you for sharing even the most difficult things you're welcome okay so now I switch back to the powerpoint can you see it yes okay great okay so some important results from the data the first one is that we can see the teacher supports of children's possibility to make choices concerning the narratives they want to tell and the way they want to tell them so this is done through dialogue empathy and signs of listening the teachers stimulate trust free expression of own feelings and thoughts and they negotiate together with the children the rules and how to shape the social relations they are involved in according to students need to the students need they enhance children participation and autonomy without a victimization of those who come from our experiences but just evaluating but just giving value to their knowledge and they create connections and spaces for children who live similar experiences even if in other part of the world and in other on other circumstances so facilitating dialogue and children personal expression is done through some specific actions for example questions which enhance participation formulations which summarize explicates or develop the meaning of what children just said or minimal responses which show listening and attention but at the same time focus on the fluidity of the conversations and give space for children to go deeper into their narratives through facilitation children are treated as experts of their own experiences and their feeling and the social life they are living so there is an upgrading of their epistemic authority which means the set of rights and responsibilities in knowledge production within the classroom it's not just the teacher who has the right to produce knowledge but these rights are shared between the adult and the children okay these are some of the relevant outputs that will come out of child up so an archive is going to be ready very soon and it will be it will collect all some of these interactions and some of the interviews the extract of the interviews and data that we collected through questionnaires there will also be guidelines for facilitation by the end of May which are based on the analysis of best practices across the the several partners in the European partners and a training package for professionals training this is done to operationalize the methodological guidelines and finally there will be also always by the end of May a massive open online course to distribute the training to a European wide wide audience and in this MOOC the materials will consist of video lectures interactive workshops to analyze examples from best practices based on the context on the content of the lectures slides and tools for self assessment of learning all these outputs will be translated in the seven languages of the of the partners of the consortium thank you thank you Sarah for this excellent and very insightful presentation I'm sure that there are going to be a lot of questions that are already in the chat so we will move to the last but not least presentation that will be by the hand by Matija and Barbara I'm going to introduce both of them they are going to share the their presentation so Matija Sethmark is a PhD in sociology and she's the principal research associate and the head of the Institute for Social Science at the Science and Research Center Cooper in Slovenia her research interests include ethnic and intercultural studies migration management of cultural diversity and topics in sociology of everyday life and sociology of the family she's the head of the section for intercultural studies at the Slovenian sociological society and the leader for many national and international projects included the horizon 2020 me create a project migrant children and communities and a transformative and a transforming Europe that she will be with Barbara presenting and Barbara Gornick she's a research associate at the Science and Research Center of Cooper her research interests are migration nationalism and human rights which she studies using the anthropology of human rights and discourse theory as basic theoretical standpoints to explain the implementation and interpretation of human rights as an effect of knowledge and power relations she works as an academic coordinator of the me create project and she has published work dealing with asylum refugees migrant children international human rights law and any other issues so the floor is for both of you thank you Teresa uh I seem to have some problems with sharing this okay we did have a testing yes so uh maybe paula can share it instead of you on your behalf yes that would be great I don't see no it does not work it doesn't work no okay paula she now now we are seeing your your screen okay just a second okay so now because I cannot see you but you can see you can see we can see the the cover a great fun I'm glad that we found the way so thank you for inviting us we are very happy to be here and to share our project results with this on this very important topic as you already mentioned we are coordinators of the horizon 2020 project it is entitled migrant children and communities in the transforming Europe and this project is basically a research about how integration of migrant children happens at the level of policy but also in concrete social relations in this presentation we would like to give really a brief presentation how the my great project was implemented and what are its main basic starting points and then my colleague will present tools for inclusive education specifically the ones that we have developed within the project that is IC tools digital storytelling application and another one which is called awareness rising tool and the third one is about handbook for teachers which has different topics if we have time at the end we would also like to share with you video with key policy recommendations but we will see that at the end so just a few things about the project similar than the child up project our is also included very big consortium we had 15 academic institutions and NGOs from 12 European countries and more than 70 researchers were involved in these activities we started in January 2019 and we will end in couple of months that is in June 2020 so as I already mentioned we wanted to learn about more about how integration of migrant children happens this is why the majority or the the main focus of our project was actually research with children but also with other stakeholders research with children in schools took place from September 2019 and concluded in September 2021 it was a rather long period for research because we we were facing certain challenges because of the COVID restrictions and we had difficulties in accessing the sites schools were closed and so on so but nevertheless the research took place in 10 different countries excuse me Matija sorry Paula can you move to the next slide because we are only seeing the cover page the first page and maybe if you can put it in a presenter mode sorry we have these small technical issues I see that it is opened from the browser perhaps it can be downloaded and then it's easier to open it Paula do you hear us yes I can hear you I'll um sharing for a second and I'll see if I okay now it's perfect yeah we can see the cover page and now you can also take control of the presentation can you see the controller yeah yeah I have control now thank you thank you okay so um back to uh yeah I stopped here so the research took place in schools in Denmark Spain UK Austria Slovenia and Poland whereas in Italy France Greece and Turkey we also did research in asylum homes reception centers and camps refugee camps the unique approach in our project I believe it was that we devoted quite a lot of time to participant observation this is very important this was very important for us because we wanted to gain some trust from children we wanted to first build some kind of relationship to spend as much time with them as possible before inviting them to their interview so because we believe that in this way we will obtain more honest answers and not to gain something that children think they should tell to the researchers some of us also applied art based approach but mainly we collected their autobiographical stories through interviews but also through focus groups in addition we also implemented a survey so the sample was that we included more than 6000 migrant and local children in the survey and had an interview with more than 500 local and migrant children also as you can see more than 500 educational staff in teachers were involved in more than 40 schools as you can see here we tended to include migrant and local children into the research because we honestly believe that integration depends on both on the local community and depending on how it is receptive towards migrants and then of course on also on the on the migrants themselves so we followed this approach to include local children in our research as well one of the basic starting points or the the key orientation of our researchers that we wanted to apply child-centered approach this means that we wanted to include children's voices and perspectives into interpretation of integration or other social phenomenon so we wanted to learn more about how children experiences experience and describe their own lives what is important to them in their lives how do they understand integration what are their challenges they are facing and what is important for their well-being according to their priorities and so on so as you can see here the child-centered approach in our case focused mainly on focus on their well-being which was explored based on the participation and involvement of children into research our research aims was to encourage integration of different groups of migrant children with adopting this so-called child-centered approach so we wanted to use it into research education and policy but overall we wanted to gain new knowledge about how about the peer dynamics in school and how this integration happens in a real relationship based on this research we did with children we wanted to develop practical tools which could be of help for teachers to use in their classrooms so in this way we wanted to enhance capacity of teachers to for diversity management but also based on the research we also wanted to develop child-centered policy recommendations I will skip this so as already mentioned there are I'm sorry Barbara I think I believe you didn't take control of this slide but we can see slide number six take control can you please now I see seven eight okay okay thanks okay so I will now give floor to my colleague who will present digital story application and had book for teachers good afternoon also my behalf so I will try to be effective in presenting our presentation so as Barbara mentioned we developed you know some of the tools which I will present now can you see the slide with digital storytelling tool okay thank you very much so this is how this digital storytelling tool looks it can be used on the computer on on tablets and the idea you know with this digital storytelling tool is that we give the possibility to children to create their visual and written stories because you know the children are now living in this digital world so we try to to to be in line with their lives but what is important here that it it's it doesn't it's not important the language knowledge of the children this means that you know the children can express themselves regardless of the language skills those who doesn't speak the local language can use mostly the object the and the pictures you know from this digital storytelling tools those who are I know familiar with some words can use simply words or sentences and those who want can really write a long stories essays reflections or dictionaries so the content it's not predefined this means that the teacher can or cannot start with some you know starting points for example teaching can use some minority literature for youth and then stimulate the children local and migrant to reflect on the topic and this can be a starting point you know for the reflection about the topics related to the multiculturality migration integration and so on the aim of the digital storytelling tool is actually on one hand to give a space to children to express themselves you know in a written way or in other other forms more visual and also to give a space to the teacher and to the children to to to discuss about the topic related to the integration and migration okay thank you very much so this story that the children develop can be printed but in the pdf files this digital story tool can be accessible via our page and it's supported in English, Slovenian, Danish, German, Spanish and Polish language for now the other I said it tool is so-called awareness rising application how it looks it can be seen from this picture the title is multiculturality in schools and can be used individually or collectively in in the classroom via mobile phones at the beginning children choose a language here we have the support of CIS languages that were involved in our in the in the development of this app and here we can actually find 13 animated interactive videos which are dealing with different topics so these videos are very diverse you know but they are all focusing on the issues related to migration challenges with integration as for example discrimination racism language learning acceptance in the in the classroom or non-acceptance and so on and the users are encouraged to to to be more active and they are invited to reply to the quiz questions there are also some reflective questions in relation to the to the stories and there are also split story lines this mean that if you choose one answer then the story and in one way if you choose the other answer than the story you know and in the other way this is this awareness tool can be also used as a starting point for the further discussion you know among teachers and the class in relation to the to the multicultural issues and is also supported for now in English, Slovenian, Danish, German, Spanish and Polish language it can be used we as we say we as we can see Google Play or App Store okay the last one I want to present you very shortly is a handbook for teachers with a title living in the multicultural schools these are actually the collections of the good practices from all around Europe and this handbook has four chapters plus indicators for measurement of children well-being in these four chapters we are addressing different you know areas the first one is actually a collections of the practices for multicultural education and diversity management the second one the second chapter is the collection of practices for solving interacting conflicts in the school environment the third one is the collection of art based practices and approaches that can be used by by teacher in the class and then the fourth one is collection of best practices related to the organization of everyday life in multicultural schools and the last one the last chapter is including the indicators that with and with these indicators we are actually measuring the well-being of the children their level of integration and also how this integration and well-being is changing through time in each chapter there are 13 practices and as mentioned they were collected all around the Europe so this means that they are reflecting the realities of different states of different schools and of different cultural environments and what we what I also want to emphasize is that we ask children advisory boards from our you know partners groups to help us to develop these practices to choose these practices to level to develop them in a way that they are the most you know suitable to the reality how they how they see it and also all these practices were piloted in the concrete schools among different age groups in the primary and secondary schools in six countries across the Europe for now handbooks are in are available in English Slovenian Danish German Spanish and Polish language we are thinking about to to translate it in some other languages however this is also in related to the time and to the of course finances the very final versions we will have it on web page in June 2022 this is how these handbooks will look at the end here we have the the handbook in the Polish language which is finished now as we can see you know we will have also different colors for different you know chapters for I know for the chapter resolving inter inter-epid conflicts will be in one color how to organize every day life in multicultural school in other color so that it will be easily you know located which practice we search for and then in the final chapter we have these indicators of migrant conceptualization of all being as I said it can be used by a teacher or by the schools for periodical measurement of the well-being of migrant children the level of their integration but also to evaluate the existing school measures there are two sets of indicators or indicators included in this in this chapter the first to refer to the migrant children the second to the school environment and for each indicators there there is a description a guiding questions for the indicators and also a measurement tools and here just to show you very concretely for example a questionnaire for the children example how concrete question looks we also use this smiley smiley so that it can be a little bit easier for the younger children to use it and then we have also an example for the educators how they can evaluate their own schools guiding questions as for example are there any learning support measures available in the schools yes no are the I don't know psychosociological services and so on so there are questions that evaluate the state in the concrete schools from the integration perspective so if you if you want to have some more information about our work you can look at our web page you can contact us directly and we have also this promoting five minutes video where we collected the key recommendations but I'm not sure if you have time so I would like to finish here but if we have time I'm asking the organizers of this webinar to tell us we can show also the promoting video but if we do not have time it's it's fine anyway because it can be found on our web page okay thank you Matija maybe we can share the link of the video in the chat and start the conversation and the debate okay thank you very much is that fine yes yes perfect okay thank you I think that this has been an incredible wealth of information of the two projects and the introductionary remarks I think looking at the chat there are a lot of interest among our audience to ask questions I already identified different questions for for our speakers so maybe I will start posting them to the speakers but of course I encourage all the the people who are following us from many different parts of Europe to write their questions in the chat so we can read them upload and address them so the first question was for Cosmi and it was posted by the European Parents Association and while you were talking and presenting they were asking if of the the model that you were presenting good fall in the line with inclusive and transformative education thank you Teresa and thank you for the for this question it is indeed very much aligned with the logic of inclusive and and transformative education and actually in this in this presentation as I was telling you it was more like an invitation of of taking this step back and reflecting upon upon diversity in education in the more general sense but then of course there are a lot of issues that we could discuss for four hours especially looking just at this table of the monocultural and then the intercultural teacher and there there were comments on on that as well and I think that one of the dimensions that is very visible in this intercultural logic and the intercultural teacher description is the ability to reflect upon his or her own practices and to to analyze the the classroom to conduct some sort of a research of what is going on in the classroom and this is a very important element also of transformative learning when we reflect upon our own experience and then we reach new meanings and we reach new understandings of our own practices and our own actions so it's very much aligned with with this theory indeed thank you Cosmi and I don't know if the other speakers want to add anything should we move to the next question one question that was opposed to Sara and a lot of questions were around the facilitation concept that you were showing through the script was if if if one person that didn't it doesn't show the name here in the chat set that are we examining here that we should encourage people to express their feelings so maybe if you want to to clarify and to complement this notion of facilitation which is the yeah thank you thank you Teresa and thank you to the personal ask this question um yeah I think um one the focus is um of course feelings are important but also on personal stories so to give a space in school even in school to for children to share uh their personal stories and their personal narratives so these um is a way to break that uh division between roles and to focus on on person which means also feelings and uh views uh personal perspectives so yeah I would rather talk about personal stories because it's a wider um category that includes also feelings okay thank you Sara I think that this is very much aligned with the the me create project because you are also working a lot with sharing these uh personal stories so maybe you want to also to to add about uh the storytelling and the other tools that are very much based on on sharing the the experiences and the stories of these children and their families we cannot hear you you are mute well actually the the idea behind the storytelling application is exactly this you know we wanted to create a tool that will um enable migrant children and local children together to to create stories to express themselves but also uh as already Mattea explained you know to use it as a pedagogical tool for intercultural uh discussions for example I don't know uh children can make summaries of of uh some literature from home they would like to talk about or something or we even thought um it it should be stressed that they can use their own language for example it's not not necessarily to be the language of the whole society so that the the identity or the of the children is kind of valued you know in this sense uh we tested this um we that we tested this in schools and we um had a really positive reply uh response from children um and they we saw very different ways how they used it uh some that we didn't even imagine that that could be used you know as a discussion pro and contra for example between different arguments or I don't know sending invitations uh so yeah it was a way of creativity because also um creativity uh an input of children is something that is uh basically a starting point of the child centered approach we uh we adopted in our project so this is the participation of children's creativity development of skills language learning all this together comes with the digital storytelling application okay thank you uh there is a general question posed to to all the speakers and it refers of on how um not only teachers but also school authorities school directors and other school professionals should be open in these useful tools and see beyond the completion of curriculum so maybe from both projects or even cosmic from his experience can uh address this question of how to involve all the administrators and the other staff of of the educational centers the and the teachers I can I can start if that's okay um I think this is very much in line with uh with one of the last points that that I was making in my presentation that when you are trying to work towards the implementation of this intercultural pedagogy and trying to respect diversity and value diversity in your classroom sometimes you might actually face resistance from from the wider school structures so this is actually something that we see in practice in in the schools that that we we work with it it becomes visible sometimes that it is not easy to to take the the school administration or or other relevant school actors on board but then of course it is a matter of of mutual learning no and I think that there are many opportunities in our school settings in which we we learn from each other and we collaborate and then we can also bring these issues into the table and I think one of the the best arguments to this is precisely this realization and recognition that the cultural diversity or diversity in general is not something that is strictly about migrant or refugee children but it is about all our children so once we start understanding these children in their complexity in their diversity it's only there that that we can actually engage with with this mindset and with these pedagogical practices and if we work towards a diverse and an intercultural environment in our schools all students will benefit and not only the migrants and of course the migrants as well and that is a very important topic but it is not a sectorial or an isolated effort I think this is the one of the best arguments that we can use in this process thank you maybe from the child app project Sarah do you want to share how you have worked with all also these actors these important actors yeah I agree with Cosmin because it's not always easy and sometimes you have to face some yeah doubts on these kind of methods I think for example the pandemic was very important to do to to to force to a change or at least to force to for a reflection to ask people to reflect on how to permit children to express themselves in a situation in which things were moving so fast and adults were taking all these choices that children weren't really considered you know and many people working in school I think they had to face the fact that children were living a moment of great frustration and and difficulties of course not in every educational context I think people reacted positively to these difficulties but we encountered some situations in which the teacher welcomed very happily our intervention because they thought that could be a moment in which children had the opportunity that were they they weren't having in that moment to express themselves and to share their own narratives in a moment in which the narratives were mainly produced by adults so yeah thank you Sarah so maybe now we can address like the last question that we'll be able to to respond today and maybe the the colleagues from the recreate project and store hunter asked how do we take the classroom experience out of the community more effectively so I didn't know if you have also worked with families and the community in the testing and piloting of all these practices and tools are you asking us yes yes so we were mostly involved in the in the work within the schools so we were not so you know active outside the schools regardless the facts that we fully you know agreed that it is really important to evolve also the local community parents and so on you know but actually our tools were generated for the school environment but if I may relate to the your previous you know question I would say that what we found out in all our research you know in different countries is that it's really depend if we are you know in the local environments with the longer tradition of multiculturality then it's much easier to involve you know other stakeholders you know the whole school community local community and so on the biggest problem is with the local communities which until now didn't have you know so much experiences with multi multicultural realities however you know the multiculturality of the Europe is a fact this is not something we we can choose it's not something that will happen and from our perspective you know the first thing really really important is information about all these things as Cosmin presented now today you know all these theoretical you know starting points you know the other hand we realized that sometimes it was a turning point when we faced you know with the principles and local communities with the fact that if we all of us you know not only migrant people but all of us if we want to live in the environment which is safe which is you know which is accepting and so on it is really important that we address multiculturality and this intercultural acceptance because at the end of the end if we ignore multiculturality if we don't want to recognize the presence of the refugee and migrant children and adults then at the end you know we are facing the future that it will be you know exclusive where there will be segregation where there will be ghettoization and so on and nobody want actually to live in such a society you know which is segregate which is dividing and so on so it's really important that we realize that this is our present this is our future and that we must you know accept to be living in such a you know diverse society in many ways thank you thank you all I think that I don't know if Sarah or Cosming want to have a final word or the team of me create Barbara and Latisha no I think that we can leave it here there are a lot of positive comments in the chat and also there has been a lot of sharing of resources links to platforms to working groups to webinars so we encourage to revise this chat because a lot of information has been shared here interesting information also the two websites for the two projects that have been presented today I think that we can finish here this really really really interesting and important and timing webinar thank you all for for your participation and just to have a nice weekend to all the all the people who are sharing with us this afternoon thank you thank you thank you thank you Teresa