Writing for Inclusion

Mireia Canals-Botines and Núria Medina-Casanovas
Introduction

The six chapters presented in this book are the result of the European Erasmus+ KA201 Project Writing for Inclusion (WIN). The project developed aims at making the children in the 4th year of Primary Education aware of the diversity within the school grounds, trying to create an atmosphere of inclusion through the concept of Care in Education. Each chapter wants to explain the different steps followed to create a didactic proposal to enhance writing for students in the 4th year of Primary Education.

The first set of aims within the Erasmus+ WIN Project was to share knowledge and best practices, to broaden teachers’ understanding of inclusive educational policies across Europe, to develop more inclusive attitudes towards diversity through creativity in digital storytelling, and the use of technology as part of the emerging literacy process, as well as helping pupils develop positive attitudes towards inclusion in the class.

Inclusion in this context refers to the idea of real learning opportunities for all children in the school classroom, for different cultural, economic, and social background groups that have been traditionally excluded. Inclusion means not only varied learning aptitudes but also giving all children a fair chance to learn and develop the skills they need for life.

In the period 2020–2023, we created a four-country consortium to form a team for the European project. The consortium was formed by universities and Primary schools alike. As far as the universities are concerned, the members of the team were as follows: the University of Vic – Central University of Catalonia (UVic-UCC) from Spain, who were the leaders of the project; Università di Firenze from Italy (UNIFI); Eötvös-Loránd University (ELTE) from Hungary; and Poltava V.G. Korolenko National Pedagogikal University (PNPU) from Ukraine. The four schools were Les Pinediques, from Spain; Istituto Comprensivo Le Cure, from Italy; Erzsébetvárosi Két Tanítási Nyelvű Általános Iskola és Szakgimnázium, from Hungary; and Poltava Comprehensive school of I-III degree # 18, from Ukraine. The main aim of the project was to create inclusive practices and tackle the effective use of digital storytelling to foster Care in childhood education.

The pupils forming part of the project came from very diverse cultural, economic, and social backgrounds, and this diversity was an asset for the children’s involvement. Children participated by exchanging their animations with all the school partners, and they will thus become familiarized with cultural and social diversity in the other countries.

A previous step before starting the project was the creation of an eTwinning page between the schools taking part in the project. From September 2020 to June 2021 the eTwinning platform helped to create bonds among the participating schools. All the activities included in this eTwinning project were thought to allow pupils and teachers in the different schools to get to know each other and get familiarized with the cultural and geographical aspects of the other countries. Sharing all these aspects allowed them to see similarities that brought them together and differences that enriched each other. It was the meeting point of the schools as the basis for a better understanding. The specific aims of the eTwinning project were to learn about other countries and cultures and infer their own, create a better cultural understanding, build a European identity, develop oral and written skills in English, and improve students’ ICT skills.

The core of the Erasmus+ WIN Project was writing stories by the school children to create awareness among students of what inclusion means. One of the aims of the project was to develop inclusive attitudes towards diversity through creativity in digital storytelling and the use of technology as part of the emerging literacy process.

When the schools started creating the stories, they conducted some brainstorming with the children to know what topics they were going to tackle. Out of this brainstorming came keywords like hospitality, citizenship, democracy, difference and empathy.

The schoolteachers shared the activities with the schoolchildren. All the activities contained videos and stories showing the different topics, to make children aware of care in education.

Once the children were acquainted with them, they were asked to create their own stories dealing with the different topics, related to their own situations. The children used their own L1, to make writing and expressing themselves better. Once they had created the stories, they sent them to their respective Universities to translate into English, to be shared with all the school members.

A digital platform was created to be used by children at school. This platform had a selection of different characters to create the animation of the written stories. The fact of making these stories animated digitally motivated the pupils because they could visualize their written version.