Europeans for Peace

In our everyday lives the topic of disabilities often is not more than a marginal aspect, something that has to do with others. So for this project our central goal was to bring this topic to the foreground and also ‘closer’ to us.

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Setting out on our eTwinning journey together for us is learning together, finding out about different attitudes in different countries concerning our main theme and topic, bridging between the past, presentand future, communicating, making friends, trying out new technology and enjoyable activities together.

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• We started with a closer look at ourselves, our bodies, how our environment impacts on us to change our ways of seeing ‘special’ needs. We then moved on to build competences and a change of perspective. We sometimes disable ourselves and others, enabling takes individual and joint effort and playful approaches.

• Types of Activities: We combined activities with a self-exploring (‘En-Abling’, city-ralleys and school-exploration with wheel chairs and blind folded), research and investigative (we worked together with the ‘stumbling blocks’ Project in Ibbenbüren researching the central archives of hospitals to put together a list of names and life stories of handicapped people), creative (‘poster design’ for our final exhibition), a communicative (‘all activities) focus.

• Activities and Methods: We started by getting to know each other and getting warm using English for communicating (‘About me’, ‘Our map’, ‘Three stations along my way to school’). We then cast light onto what a ‘handicap’ in general terms can mean and that being ‘handicapped’ is a part of our everyday lives. Building competencies on knowledgeable viewpoints can enable (‘En-Abling’, ‘Projects from and with handicapped people’), we gather a broader view on the types of disabilities that might affect people (‘Different Types’). We move to a change in perspective which might help inspire different actions (‘How our environment …’)

• Movies and stories further bring to our hearts that there is no them and us. Every one of us is sometimes infringed by our bodies, our environments and our own views of the world.

• We invited an eye-witness and victim of the Nazi Race ideology to our (German) school (Ingrid Matko von Ölhafen). Listening to real live stories was a touching experience.

• In our histories we can find numerous examples of how stigma attached to handicaps meant that people with special needs were prosecuted. Whole lists of names were wiped off city registrars. We (Germany) will try to find traces of these people – even if it is only their names. We cooperate with the local stumbling blocks project.

• We explored new ways to put video conferencing into the hands of our students by embedding a video chat box for group work into our Twinspace and encouraging students to use it. We took eTwinning into our schools by informing about the results of our excursions and workshops.