As everyone knows, Sicily, by vocation, has hosted diverse multicultural groups over the centuries. Our school, in particular, presents a multicultural context with students coming from overseas countries, mainly from the Maghreb area, Bangladesh, Shri-Lanka India. This context makes us particularly sensitive to such social issues as integration, tolerance and acceptance of diversity. However I feel that my colleagues and I haven’t developed a good cultural competence yet as to make the process of integration of these students successful and prevent the risk of social exclusion and the school dropping out.

PADLET:I'm taking part in this course to learn better how to create activities in my classroom to help students having different cultural, ethnic background to integrate in the classgroup. This is very difficult to achieve as these students born in Italy, who have attended italian school and have learnt to communicate in italian nevertheless their way of thinking, opinions lifestyle is different and we hardly understand it. The process of integration is not successful for most of them.

Reflections: As a Teacher I've to develop in my students an intercultural competence, be open-minded towards new cultures , different lifestyle and languages. In my classroom as Alicia suggested we should use not only the typical English or Italian ,Spanish names very popular in our textbooks but the names in the language of our migrant students, read stories or legends of those countries mostly present in our school, invite the students to talk about their typical food and exchange recipies with the local students, celebrate festivals and get to know each other more deeply. With the help of technologies this is much easier and students can use their creativity to tell about themselves and their world.

I find very important to create a sense of community in our school  and luckily  both headmaster and some teachers are very active with many projects which involve both students and also the territory for example  last year some students taught elderly people how to use the computer or start up being a technological  school is part of a network of schools to make  students create their own business. One of the best product of a start-up experience was made by a boy from Shri-Lanka together with an Italian boy, both of them are my students. Within the classroom framework as Alicia points out it  is very important to create this sense of identity and belonging that can be achieved in many ways creating a close facebook group of the class where to share opinions, ideas and upload materials or a class project , this year my third class will be involved together  with other classes in a multicultural project using comics as a means of communication to deal with this topic and celebrate diversity for example  organizing at Christmas an event where Italian and migrant  students present typical food or read poems and sing.

Total learning time: 140

Number of students: 26 students

Description: the students are required to read two stories of refugee children from Syria or other countries involved in wars or terrorism and  watch the map to follow their route from their home country to to the refugee camps,   finally to watch a video. This activity  is aimed to get students know deeper the real situation of these migrants and develop an awareness and empathy towards refugee people. Involve students in discussions that can help them to  form opinions not influneced by racial prejudices. The target group of students are aged 16/17 and their level of English is betweeen B1-B2

to raise  awareness about the situation of refugee and in particular of children; to learn more about the reason they flee away; to develop in students openmindeness so to overcome prejiudices, empathy towards these refugees so to deal differently with their own classmates coming form not european countries, to accept diversity and consider it a value and not something negative to fight against or build barriers to protect our  well established life model and build  a new model of society.

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Teaching-Learning activities

Children refugee's stories. Diversity a value!

Flipped classroom: the students have first received the URL where to find the two stories about the refugee children: at home they have to read and acquire new words linked to the topic, made a map of the lexicon  and prepared a list of points of discussion for the class activity. Teacher is not present in this first step.  They have also to  watch a map on the website where to follow the route of these children's journey.
 

In classroom  before the discussion activity, the students will watch a video about one of these children: the story of Matiullah, an afaghanistan boy who fleed to UK so they will learn about Taliban and the reason why this boy escaped. they will become more aware and open- minded after wathching and reading these stories and willing to overcome racial prejudices , stereotypes, commonplaces.  After the watching students will be asked comprehension questions  to check their understanding.
 

The students now are ready to discuss about the situation in Syria, but  the focus is on the  tragedy of children who flee away with their family or sometimes alone and  find after a difficult and  high- risk journey a shelter  in a Lebanon camp or Uk. They have to think over and  talk about children's  feeling when they were in Syria among the bombs, then their emotions after being rescued and how their life changed in the  new country. Then they should talk about their emotions if  they found themselves in a similar situation.

 Produce                         50 minutes      students         Tutor is available

Group work : Students are divided in groups of 3 to take different roles, one  student is the   interviewer and the other one is  the refugee child then exchange roles. First they have to prepare  the questions and answers and then dramatize a situation similar to the one of  the children. Another student will film the dramatization.

the lesson  product will be a film shot by students  during the dramatization stage.