Exploring the current situation
To prepare for the first international meeting, students had to gain more knowledge on the current situation in their country. Where do refugees come from? How many refugees are in each country or city? What challenges do they face? What challenges do we face in supporting or educating them?
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Students made a presentation on this subject and showed it during the project meeting in Belgium.
Promoting peer learning
At school, students struggle to cooperate with FIS students. Communication is difficult and their situation, background and culture often hard to relate to. At the same time, FIS students point out that their main concern at school is or was the lack of friends and support of other students.
Yet, formal and informal peer learning can play an extremely important role both in the integration and learning process of FIS students. Therefore it is important to promote peer learning.
Teachers can design lesson plans that facilitate cooperation and include assignments that offer additional learning opportunities for students with a different mother tongue and background. They can also include empathy exercises to increase the understanding of the complex situation of refugee students.
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In this project, we organized a life interview and Q&A session with a refugee student and a cooking workshop with refugee students. We designed lesson plans that focus on inclusion, cooperation and empathy (materials section), including a creative assignment to fight stereotypes and prejudices. ​​​
Looking at or own past and future
We often experience the feeling of a large distance between us and the refugees in our country. Their situation is so different from ours that it is hard to understand what they are going through. We feel as if this could never happen to us and/or never happened to us.
Starting from the situation in Belgium, we invited the students to think about their own past and future. Were or are they at risk to become a refugee or is this really unthinkable? During an interactive presentation we also touched on the reasons why you would flee, the fact that families are torn apart, the feelings of unsafety and other related issues. We visited the Red Star Line museum as an example of refugees in the past and included an assignment at the museum.
Involving the local community
To increase chances of success for FIS students, cooperation between the school and the local community is necessary. Organizations involved in the guidance of refugee students, host parents to unaccompagnied minors, volunteers who became buddies to refugees, etc can play an important role in the school carrier of these students. Schools should not only be aware of the possibilities for additional support in the local community, but also have an idea on what the partners involved do or could do.
During the project meeting several organizations, a host parent and a buddy gave a testimony and more insight in their work via a presentation, followed by round table conferences with the students.
