Aims & Objectives
BACKPACK ID aims at promoting the inclusion of refugee children and adolescents (aged 10-15) at school-wide level, while fostering harmonious inter-group relations in local communities. It also aims at empowering all students, both new-comers and majority-group members, and places emphasis on students’ own multiple group memberships and multiple skills and assets.
The objectives pursued by BACKPACK ID are:
- Empowering students by encouraging them to draw on their cultural, linguistic, and other identity resources, thus facilitating communication with- and feedback from students’ families and/or immediate background.
- Promoting students’ ability to reflect on similarities and differences amongst them, and see their experiences in a broader comparative, transnational European context, thus letting students reflect on the challenges of social inclusion from the angles and perspectives applied in other European communities.
- Mapping the variety and multiplicity of students’ identity resources on a comparative transnational basis, and forming a corpus of original data for research use.
- Producing a set of comprehensive and innovative educational materials for multi-media use by students and teachers.
- Assisting teachers with understanding and handling identity dynamics in class.
- Involving all key agents, pupils, teachers and other education practitioners, community agencies and stakeholders, in critically reflecting upon the challenges of social inclusion in a bottom-up European framework.
The above objectives may only be pursued transnationally, in a rich and diverse comparative context. Greece and Italy on the one hand, and Germany and Sweden on the other hand, form an ideal context to this end for many reasons, including their differences as regards their role in the European management of the refugee crisis, their socio-economic characteristics and positions, policies, and educational models. BACKPACK ID is based on and aims to expand this diversity in needs and perspectives, while affirming common European values in a grassroots approach to social inclusion.
