Healthy Living and Equal Opportunities Through Sport

"Seven schools belonging to Portugal, Greece, Romania, Italy, Poland, Latvia and Spain with different dimensions, contexts and backgrounds but with a common interest in improving their working methods and exchange methodologies and good practices were involved in the strategic partnership ""Healthy Living and Equal Opportunities Through Sport"".According to horizontal and field specific priorities in school education the main objectives of the exchange were to adapt learning programmes in the participating schools considering: sport practice, outdoor physical activities, healthy lifestyle education, inclusion and integration as instruments to face this items in order to increase students' awareness about risky behaviour, providing conditions to increase civic conscience, cultural development and self-fulfillment. Complementarily, other goals were to fight against addictions, guarantee equal rights and opportunities to students with disabilities and foster the integration of people of different race and backgrounds. Globally we aimed to enhance the qualities that should prevail in an European citizen.The project was lead and developed through the action of two main working teams composed of teachers and students, having the leading role in the project, organizing the activities in each school. Three main topics were developed along the three years project lifetime: ""Youth Health and nutrition and sport practice against disease and obesity; Addictions and risky behaviour in sport and youth's daily life"" the first, ""Inclusion and disability"" the second and ""Sport against racism and xenophobia as a mean to foster social integration"" in the third year. For each topic we developed a variety of activities (competitions, experiments, videos, workshops, meetings, presentations, surveys, researches, visits, glossary, exhibitions), two final products, a public event and a final conference. We also made a final publication and the guidelines of good practices for internal and external dissemination.Learning activities abroad involved around 80 students, giving them the opportunity to deepen the topic with special activities using informal and non-formal methods, reinforce their intercultural learning, develop new competences and transfer them to their schoolmates.Apart from other dissemination platforms, an eTwinning project was defined concurrently to show off the project to the public and share experiences among schools during the project and after the end of the project, becoming a space to exchange information among schools, keep in touch and plan other activities after the project completion, thus guaranteeing to achieve a multiplier effect and a sustainable impact on their own organization.DEOR for this project was defined carefully to give a high level of involvement inside and outside the organizations involving all the schools' communities, families of all students and local and national organisations.The main results of the project, which constitute also long terms benefits are: a better involvement of students in the school activities implementing strategic use of ICT and another innovative learning methods; a deep impact on the participant schools as they implemented working methods and defined innovative practices through a common approach, exchanging experiences of good practice; the implementation of methods of social inclusion of students with disability and enable quality learning for all to prevent drop out and take care of students with cultural and social disadvantages; the promotion of intercultural dialogue, tolerance and acceptance; the reduction of disparities in learning outcomes affecting learners with disadvantaged backgrounds; to provide conditions to increase civic conscience, cultural development and self-fulfillment; the awakening of the world curiosity that leads to increase of motivation to learn; to increase effective communication between European schools and its communities.Since the students of the working teams will be involved after leaving school as former expert students they will establish a working group and support new students and the school to give sustainability to the project in the following years. In such a way, they can cooperate with their past and new school in order to apply for other EU projects or identify new target groups among their acquaintances to involve in other actions of Erasmus +, such as youth exchanges.In the future schools will be able to strengthen the links (by sharing common experiences and also by defining other projects such as exchanges of students and teachers for language improvement) and improve teaching methods in years to follow defining new guidelines of good practice.This cooperation among participant schools is the strong point for the sustainability of the project and was the base of the application process for another strategic partnership that can reinforce the multiplying effects of the present project."