Sorry for the delay in writing, actually, I was looking forward to blogging, but the beninning of the school year is usually a bit crazy and this year more than ever. We applied for an Erasmus + project and, guess what! Yes, it has been approved!! So, we have been pretty busy preparing everything to get started! It's going to be an amazing and enriching experience for all of us and we are really excited about it. I'll let you know how things go.

Here you are a brief summary of our project:

UniDiversity is a project about cultural identity and has to do with those characteristics that define us and make us belong to a group of people, community or country.

We will work on different issues such as language, family, religion, education, gastronomy, politics, climate, customs, traditions, lifestyle, music, art, etc organized into five main topics for study and research:

1. Role of women. We will study the traditional roles given to men and women in the different countries that participate in this project and the development of the role of women in the last century. We will pay special attention to all the messages that our culture through music, cinema, etc transmits us about what a woman is supposed to be and we will discuss about gender violence.
2. Prejudices and stereotypes. What do we think about ourselves and about the others? Is it real? How do they affect our attitude towards immigrants? We will also learn about the others and discover the contribution of foreign cultures to our own ones.
3. Globalization and different lifestyles. We want to analyse how globalization is affecting our way of living and we will see advantages and disadvantages. Are we losing our national identity because of globalization?. We will study about the use of the internet, social networks, mobile phones, Mass Media and so on.
4. Festivals and traditions. It is impossible to deny the influence of culture in our way of thinking. That’s why we want to work on them, to get to know about different festivities, their origins, the similarities among the countries. The role of women and men in our traditions, the values they promote and if they have turned into old fashion or continue being current.
5. Education system and citizen participation. In this case we are going to see different education systems and different ways to participate as critical citizens in society.

There will be three countries involved: Spain, Poland and Romania and these are the different contributions that each organization can bring to our project:  -Spain. We will focus on the issue of the role of woman in society. Spain is a Catholic country, defender of a traditional family and with a macho culture. Many cases of gender-based violence are taking place nowadays and we want to find out whether it only happens in this country or it has become a global problem.
-Romania. It is a country we don’t have much information about, we just know something about its gypsy background. We are amazed by the different religions that coexist in the country and how this may have influenced its inhabitants and its language of Latin origin like Spanish. We will see similarities and differences with the rest of the countries.
-Poland. Being one of the relatively recent countries that joined the European Union after the fall of communism, we are interested in getting to know how this transition took place and how it has affected people in its opening towards Europe. It will be relevant to get first-hand knowledge about the impact on its economy and society.
We will also deal with prejudices and stereotypes because of the high number of immigrants in our countries. We would like to know how the problem of refugees is being lived and what solutions are being given.
Finally, we will compare the different education systems and the citizen participation in each of the participant countries.

The purpose of all the activities is to promote among the students the development of skills such as the empathy, teamwork, dialogue, etc and to reach this objective we must think about our differences. Are they as deep as we can fancy? What do we have in common? Is there anything that can be called national identity? And if it is so, can we make of it a source of enrichment?

Our methodology will be active and collaborative based on the use of the new technologies and the different tools from the web 2.0 such as Blog, Google sites, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc..Students will access knowledge from a constructivist perspective, they will learn "by doing" and they will be working on the different activities in national and international cooperative teams sharing goals in order to maximize learning. Videos, podcasts, digital books etc...will be made and shared on the net. Afterwards when meeting up in a country we will review our conclusions and reflect on our previous work. Workshops will be carried out and the final products, after each visit, will be uploaded to the various digital platforms (e-twinning, blog, etc…) There will be also exhibitions, presentations, discussions and a constant dissemination plan of the whole project.

Our main aim is not only to find out similarities and differences among the countries involved and reflect on it but also to make students and teachers get involved in the knowledge creation process by working together and try to go a bit further so as to achieve meaningful  learning by extending it beyond the classroom.
Our project is a “pro human” project, with an individual-centred approach ,because we think that by searching for our own identity and getting to know the others better we can become more tolerant, generous, critical, supportive, understanding and appreciate the different cultures as a vehicle of enrichment based on mutual respect. Learning from ourselves and from the others can be an important way of social integration to build a better world.