Hosted by OSOS , contributed by laszlo.luca on 19 June 2019
Coordinated by scientists of the Media Center and the Faculty of Educational Sciences of the TU Dresden and in close cooperation with educational practitioners and researchers from Austria, Greece and Great Britain, together with international experts via Parents International, the „Open School Doors” consortium is investigating how parents with a migration background can be more actively involved in the education of their children – with the help of digital media.
In order to establish suitable school and parent partnerships, the researchers have developed a training framework for educators in the context of the „Open School Doors“ project, which should support them in organizing the integration process of migrant students at school and, indirectly, will trigger the parents’ support for that integration process as well. The training program provides teachers with a comprehensive guide onto how effective collaboration between parents and teachers may be promoted and how integration can emerge as a shared design process, overarching all respective stakeholders. Motivation, knowledge and competences of any teacher involved is strengthened together with the respective pupils and their parents in order to shape their active integration.
Feel
Schools and teachers have a difficult time to deal with migrant students and their families.
Open School Doors project aims at reducing disparities in learning outcomes affecting learners from disadvantaged backgrounds such as migrants with specific measures:
Open School Doors tries to inspire and motivate teachers and school managers for cooperating with parents with a migrant background and creating constructive and sustainable partnerships with them.
Its aim is to train teachers and school principals, so that they acquire positive mindsets and skills that will enable parents’ motivation to get also engaged in schooling. Open School Doors in fact designed a Training Framework after examining the skills, needs, local conditions and obstacles that teachers should be able to deal with in order to engage parents with a migrant background. This Framework aims at qualifying teachers to deal with foreign cultures and their specific features in a sensitive and goal-oriented way.
Open School Doors does also launch an innovative approach (on pedagogic and technical levels) to train teachers (using online tools apart from face-to-face sessions) as well as social networking applications to connect them with the parents of the participating schools’ pupils.
The project does also constitute a European wide initiative, targeting a final number of 50 schools from 5 EU countries.
To start with, you are invited to assess existing parental involvement skills with special focus on migrant inclusion, training needs to develop these skills, and local context, including challenges, opportunities and possible obstacles
Imagine
Investigation and discussion among the students towards the selection of an innovative solution. Imagination of the outcome and on how this outcome will address the challenge.
How could you support migrant families in your environment to feel welcome and empowered? How could you transform the school to cater for the needs of these families too?
Our starting point were the challenges the schools face when it comes to families with a migrant background. We imagined a tool for them, where schools can step out of their comfort zone, and realize, that in order to cooperate for the best interest of the child, they need to work together with the parents and families of all children.
Based on the assessment in the Challenge phase, you are invited to use the online platform and design your local training. Based on the experiences of pilots, it is recommended to use a blended methodology, a mix of online and f2f training elements for maximum impact. You can also contact us in case you need trainers to support implementation.
Create
Using the Open School Doors teacher development framework enables teachers, either individually or collectively, to better support refugee or recently arrived children by helping them to develop more effective strategies for working with parents, carers and families. The framework will enable teachers to:
- Explore and evaluate
- Models of parental engagement
- Social and cultural issues that impact particularly on the experience of refugee and recently arrived parents
- Issues related to literacy and digital that frame interactions between schools and refugee and recently arrived parents
- Self-assess
- Their own communication capabilities and capacities and identify their own training needs – particularly in relation to digital literacy
- Their local context, identify needs and agree priorities and aspirations for development
- By undertaking collaborative analysis and evaluation of existing practices, successes and areas for development
- Develop
- A personal learning action plan
- Plans for class/year/school level development (dependent upon roles and responsibilities) that identify roles, structures, resources and training needs
- Success criteria that articulates and ‘quantifies’ aspirations for impact
- Strategies for development, interventions, programmes etc
- Approaches to bringing the wider community on board and working collaboratively with other teachers, managers, parents, governors and young people
- Structures to support successful implementation
- Approaches for securing adequate resources – people and ‘stuff’
- A strategy for piloting and reviewing activities and understanding impact
- Evaluate and review
- Activity and identify future goals and aspirations
Share
The project is meant to be shared and mainstreamed in as many schools as possible. The project website with all intellectual outputs is available for anyone, and we encourage parents, teachers and schools to promote it in their own communities in order to develop diverse and welcoming schools.
