Raising Education to Strengthen People Equality & Cultural Tolerance

<< Background >>The main aim of this project was to overcome and diminish deeply rooted intolerant forms of behavior that generally exist in our society and are frequently reflected in bullying, disrespectful and hateful behavior of students towards their peers who are different in any way and/or are members of certain minority groups. Our aim in this project has been to make our students aware of current, and even more, long-term dangers caused by these acts of intolerance and discrimination that have been neglected in our society for so long. Since we believed the roots of such dangerous forms of behavior are deeply embedded in our nation’s mentality and general upbringing we also believed it was necessary to start the reverse process of learning about tolerance and accepting differences from an early age. By learning about differences between people and thus eliminating ignorance, which is believed to be one of the main causes of discrimination in the first place, we will help and encourage our children to embrace another model of behavior whose base is tolerance and accepting others.<< Objectives >>Our objectives:1. promotion of communication and dialogue with members of different cultures;2. promotion of tolerant behavior, understanding and respect towards other cultures in order to reduce hate speech andbullying among students and thus prevent them from leaving school for this reason;3. encouraging students to take part in activities involving multicultural teams;4. encouraging students to understand the patterns which stereotypes and prejudices are based on and avoidgeneralizations when it comes to members of different cultures;5. involving as many students belonging to different cultures and developing activities intended to improve theircommunicative and social skills in order to improve their mutual understanding and acceptance;6. encouraging students to study different European languages and their culture;7. to encourage teachers to develop new innovative methods and material in the field of the subjects that they are involved inthe project (Physical Education, Design, Plastics, ICT, Technology and Foreign Languages) for teaching students at risk forbullying and consequentely ESL;8. to raise teachers’ awareness about students9. to encourage the learning of different languages and cultures from the Europe<< Implementation >> Among the multiple activities, the following stand out:- Creation of a powerpoint about each partner school where students presented the bullying situation in their school, town, region, country- Creation of an E-twinning platform;- Creation of the project's web page;- The organisation of a poster exhibition where the students prepared posters on the R.E.S:P.E.C.T.' topic-Activities about Arts, Phisical Education, music , robotics, languages to avoid bullying situations.<< Results >>- Realization of a Guide on R.E.S:P.E.C.T. in differents languages : English, Greece, Italian and Spanish.