42 participants from 6 EU countries met in February, in Bucharest, to discuss diversity in education and future policy proposals.
Teachers, trainers, project managers, youth workers, head masters and policy makers have come together in an effort to make the educational environment in Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy and Spain more inclusive, especially for students coming from refugee/migrant/minority backgrounds.
Their journey through facilitated discussions, roundtables, working groups and plenaries has ended with policy recommendations the DIVERSE consortium will communicate to policy makers in the 6 countries, in the hopes that education and societies in general will better cater to the needs of their youth.
Here are some of them:
1. We recommend universities to introduce the methods designed by the DIVERSE Project in the university curriculum for forming/ training future teachers.
2. We recommend the Ministry of Education to include in the offer of accredited teacher training courses the DIVERSE methods.
3. We recommend the Ministry of Education to change its criteria for accrediting teacher training courses. To be more open to accredited innovative good value courses created by NGOs or in Erasmus projects.
4. School inspectorates to recommend schools to consult the DIVERSE website and it's resources for teachers - handbook for teachers.
Teachers also got involved in constructive dialogue about their experience with the DIVERSE methods and ways of scaling them up or improving them, you can see some of their interventions bellow:
During the event, we have launched the OMG network- Organization Mentoring for Growth, a sustainability effort in the frame of the DIVERSE project, through which we aimed to get together multiple civil society actors in order to support them in tackling and managing diversity and inclusion in their communities, mainly through DIVERSE project methods.
You can find out more about the OMG network in the video bellow:
The final conference has proven to be an amazing space for networking, sharing ideas, meeting stakeholders, working on improvement of the methods, all while the participants having the chance to be surrounded by likeminded individuals with similar goals and objectives: making educational systems in particular, and societies in general, more inclusive when it comes to students/people with refugee/migrant and minority backgrounds.
Policymakers present:
Radu Szekely (RO- advisor for the Ministry of Education), Boyka Shopova (BG, Mayor's office Sofia), Nuria Sala and Clara Serda (SP, Ajuntament de Salt), Otilia Teodoru (RO- school manager), Zsombor Lakatos (HU- Menedék Hungarian Association for Migrants).
You can find the live streamed event bellow.