Three of the 11 European Youth Goals as developed in the 6th cycle of the EU Youth Dialogue are: Inclusive Societies, Mental Health and Wellbeing and Quality Learning. They are in the core of this project as we believe that the mental health and wellbeing of the individuals will lead to the wellbeing of society as a whole. Also, working on social inclusion through involving and innovative methodology will create more motivated learners and teachers and therefore morequality learning.
Being inspired by these principles, we have decided to work on a project based on a methodology of learning through and about empathy. Our students will face real-life actual cases, which they will elaborate into short films/videos by first writing a script, then directing, performing and filming. These case-study videos will end with questions for discussion and invite to action. They will be publicly available on the project website and YouTube channel. All 4 countries address a different topic connected with empathy. They have been chosen based on the schools’ expertise and curriculum andeach LTT meeting will be centred around one of them:
1) Empathy and Social Media
2) Empathy and Leadership
3) Empathy: Nature and climate
4) Empathy and cultural diversity in Europe.
The objectives are:
- Students to increase empathy or raise awareness of the need to empathise with others as a key motivating factor for active participation in society; build social and communication skills and creativity; improve foreign language skills as a tool for communication in Europe; increase the level of digital competence; increase motivation for learning; raise awareness about environmental and climate change challenges, leading to changed behaviour in consumption habits and lifestyle.
- Teachers to explore, share, and get familiar with strategies for teaching informed empathy; motivate teachers and improve their competence through exploring innovative teaching methods; acquire innovative approaches for language teaching; get familiar with innovative use of ICT in teaching and learning empathy; explore innovative ways to address social, ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity.
- To develop case-study videos as free teaching resources and describe the methodology to use them in 4 lesson plans for the 4 LTT meeting topics. Also, the methodology of the whole project will be publicly available on the project website, which will contain all study materials used throughout the 2 years of the project, like worksheets, tutorial videos or presentations.