Erasmus+ Scene Network (E+SCN) intends to merge one of Europe’s greatest successes regarding intercultural dialogue and cohesion, the Erasmus Programme, with one of Europe’s greatest challenges, the refugee crisis. Erasmus+ Scene Network is a European cultural project based on theatre and education that is addressed to 3 different target groups: Erasmus students, local students and local refuges & immigrants. It aims to make the most of these targets’ creativity and human potential promoting their integration and participation in the cultural and social life of their host city.
Erasmus+ Scene Network is a project evolved around the creation of a European network which has the following features: it was born with the objective of turning itself into a research and dialogue tool related to the creative, educational and integrative possibilities offered by the relationship between the students’ mobility phenomenon and the refugees phenomenon.
E+SCN main objective is establishing a meeting point for persons displaced for different reasons who will be working together with a common final goal: the creation of a theatre play. This process will lead to the acquisition of linguistic, communicative, artistic and expressive competencies to improve some aspects of the participants’ integration and employability.
According to these principles, E+SCN partnership agreed to choose the following two priorities as the most relevant for the excellence on the project’s running:
We would like to start commenting on “Inclusive education, training and youth”. We consider E+SCN as inclusive because it is focused on the integration of several citizenships from different strata society (refugees, migrants, Erasmus students…), through language learning, using theatre & drama as vehicle. We will organise and attend 4 different learning/training/teaching activities addressed, not only to the main participants, but also to the teachers that will give later the workshops to the first ones.
If we talk about the second priority chosen, “Open and innovative education, training and youth work, embedded in the digital era”, to say that through the 2 years of the project, more than 60 students will benefit from a different and more creative education. We, as a partnership, will promote access to and learning through different Open Educational Resources, such as the E+SCN APP, where participants will be able to find all the information, documents, guidelines and schedules related to the project’s implementation and running.
To finish we’d like to say that E+SCN will carry out different activities that will have a great impact on its participants. Moreover, we expect the participation in the project to develop different kinds of skills, such as social / interpersonal skills, cognitive skills and linguistic skills. Innovative methods are represented by the language learning methodology, based on language acquisition through theatre using innovative techniques and approaches.
INNOVATION AND COMPLEMENTARITY
E+SCN is innovative and complementary to other projects already carried out because it speeds up and improves the way students conceive, develop, experience and focus their careers and life. For instance, Escena Erasmus+ pilot project was developed by CRIT Company with the collaboration on the University of Valencia in 2010 and it was secondly implemented (as a pilot project always without funding) in different European universities, once the students who had already participated had come back to their countries. This project promotes not only non-formal linguistic learning, but it also enhances participants’ self-confidence while facing adult life. With this new project, we intend to reach great impact, not only locally, but also internationally.
E+SCN is innovative for the partnership consortium and for the staff which will attend workshops based on a new and expressly created online methodology, because the project develops a different learning approach, among improving their daily-work competencies.
E+SCN is also pioneering because it allows organisations to work in other countries to innovate and modernise teaching and training practice and youth work, ensuring that young students and adults’ teachers get the skills they need to succeed in today’s world.
Moreover, E+SCN is innovative because after its finalisation, students and teachers competences, knowledge and predisposition change. E+SCN workshops’ and experiences speed up and improve.
E+SCN is original because the students that take part in the workshops will improve the following positive aspects and competences:
(Notice that these results are taken from thousands of Erasmus Scene students surveys done through the last 2 years in Valencia)
- Language learning, not only in the local language, but also in other languages of E+SCN participants.
- Awareness to linguistic and cultural realities around Europe.
- Improved communication skills and speaking.
- Participants personal reinforcement: loss of complex, disinhibition…
- Improvement of organizational capabilities while working on team.
- Empowering the European collective identity.
- Ability to entrepreneurship given that they will learn different work skills.
- Encouraging creativity and leadership.
- Acquisition of both, personal and group-work responsibility.
E+SCN is also innovative because it includes new fundamentals, more partners and thus, more cooperation and exchange activities and complementary learning tools and methods such as:
- E-learning tools: An E+SCN application (App) will be developed to download free from the website. This tool will include practical information about the project as well as all the pedagogic, training and learning material, generate for the project purposes. It will use Creative Commons license and will be available for everyone who wants to download it. E+SN APP’s will be free and online after the project’s implementation and anyone ready to use it, will be able to join it.
- We’ll also develop one more tool; “Erasmus+ Scene Network Methodology”, which will contain all the information related to the teaching and learning method, among including all the useful information for other universities which would like to join the network.
- We’ll develop languages resources for the students thorough performing arts activities (plays) focused on theatre and drama. These productions will be exhibit in several universities. This is also a strong and innovative point, given that mixes artistic, academic and language learning, all in one.
- Without a doubt, the biggest leap forward is the creation and establishment of a real, structured and organised European network of universities, enterprises and learning institutions, which will use the planned activities to make the most of Erasmus, local students and refugees’ creativity and human potential while promoting their participation in the cultural and social life of their host city.
