YESTERMORROW

Our Partnership YESTERMORROW is built mainly with partners with whom we have already carried out project activities successfully.  (See the website of our previous project: www.gfgm2012.com). 

All the participating schools are dealing with very challenging circumstances, all the schools have numerous learners with disadvantaged backgrounds, facing the danger of social exclusion and early school leaving. During the last project (www.gfgm2012.com), the topics of resilience, good practices to face impacts of trauma in the daily school life were already identified as important for all partners. A brochure about trauma and school was written by two partner schools and disseminated among all partners. It turned out that all partners have their special knowledge, competences and sensitivity to the topic. Therefore, we came along to choose "trauma and school" as the main topic to head together to new solutions and good practices dealing with afflicted and even traumatised students.

The longer term benefits for the schools and countries involved as well as Europe as a whole are evident. Our outputs will help integrating children with learning difficulties, with emotional behavioural and social difficulties. That means that the pedagogical skills of the involved teachers must be raised and the often tabooed topic "trauma" and "traumatised children" have to be priorised. Our outputs help to do this in an efficient and effective way.

A digital collaborative learning tool will be created and administered by IPSIA Cattaneo using the well known social writing platform for education called "WIKISPACES". Wikispaces make it incredibly easy to create a  geografically distant workspace where teachers and students can communicate and work on projects alone or in teams. Rich assessment tools give organizers (teachers involved in the project) the power to measure students' contribution and engagement in real-time. It means that teachers can help those who need more help and challenge those who don't. Wikispaces Classroom can work on modern browsers, tablets and phones.
The "wiki" will contain all the project related activities. It will be the monitoring, sharing and disseminating means of all the activities, resources, and files related to the project.
The Project-Based Learning Environment will be  the core of the site where students share their experiences and teachers can monitor every step of  students' discussions, writing, work production and file uploads. Here students can "communicate" using a social blog; collaboratively "edit pages" using a visual editor; "embed content" from around the web, including videos, images, documents, and more; "comment on sections" of text or the entire page in the planned project related activities .
Teachers will be able to create individual or group assignments for different topics and different subjects (mathematics and history), choosing to set assignment start and end dates, or create long-running activities. At the end of the assignment, teachers will publish  what the students have produced to the entire community for suggestions and feedback. The WIKI space will be linked to the school project site. All the  teachers and virtual classes involved  will produce together their materials according to the planning and methodological agreements  established during the staff meetings and will create their macro units to be validated and tested during mobilities. Students and teachers will produce together sections of curricular modules  on agreed patterns in maths and  history  which will be published on the website. They will be a sort of macrounits: each one of them will develop  one or more aspects of a bite of the curricular subject identified as common by the different partners, so as to develop it according to different approaches, in different languages, but with a common topic. It might be a research, a presentation, whatever may match with a digital public of students who want to have not simply a national but a European approach to the topic itself. There will be 2 macro units for each subject for each year and they will be a sort of work in progress products because each partner will negotiate and add their works on going.

We will edit a brochure about psychological trauma and its impact on daily school life.
The foreword of the brochure edited during the last project explains the meaning of the topic "Trauma and school"::
"Reading and talking about psychological trauma can be difficult. It seems that pictures appear in the mind’s eye about students, friends, colleagues or images of our own lives. It nevertheless gives us the chance to classify difficult memories or even to better come to terms with them.
When we work with pupils and students, there are situations where we cannot understand a reaction or a disturbing behaviour. We can interpret this as a personal attack. There are also situations which provoke in us, as teachers and social workers, strong negative feelings. We even are surprised about the strength of these emotions and sometimes we, too, cannot understand them.
The surprising reaction of our students, or indeed our own strong reactions, can each arise from a psychological trauma experienced by the student a long time beforehand.
Although teachers and social workers are not engaged in therapy, it is nevertheless important to identify these experiences, for example with this brochure. This facilitates the work with students and benefits all parties."

We want to adjust the small  "old" brochure written during the last project to the new results and insights gained in the last few years and during this YESTERMORROW-project. Good practices of all partner schools will be added. We will publish it in English and translate it into Swedish, Polish, Romanian, Spanish and Italian. To ensure a good quality of translation we have had it translated by professionals. That makes sense because these brochures are a main tool to disseminate the knowledge about trauma and what teachers and social workers can do to enhance resiliance. The translated versions are easily accessible on the website. We let print them in several hundreds of copies to disseminate them in direct contact with interested professionals and at our schools. The English partner, Marriotts School, organised and coordinated the rewriting, translations and printing. 
It is an important tool for dissemination, that's why the brochure was ready in spring 2017 after 18 months of duration of the Project.

Our Project was approved and got the excellent score of 80 Points out of 100 possible Points. Our Goals are achieved!