The idea of the project has been in our mind for a while. But only now we, the Youth Association from Transylvania, an NGO from Romania found the right partners to implement our concept from Spain, Portugal and Romania. The special power of this 24 month long Strategic Partnership for School Education, is the local and international cooperation of 1-1-1 secondary school, NGO and the local government. We believe the unused potential of the cross-sectorial cooperation, and the involvement of the local government help us increase even more the quality work in terms of research and dissemination activities.
In this project we want to tackle the challenges that parents and teachers have to face with in the every days. Due to the high intensity of social media usage among the youngsters false self-images are created about how they should look like, how they should act, what they should say, and how they should behave with their surroundings. We observe this unreal identity crises at our schools and our local community as well. The deformation of ones’ self-image easily leads to depression, and bullying.

The innovative solution what this cooperation offers, is to train the teachers and parents how to realize the false images, and its destructive nature. The training focuses on emotional management at the schools as well as at home. We believe that emotional management can be the key to the success of reducing digital bullying, false need to belong, peer pressure, lack of confidence and depression. Studies show that: „Emotions are not consciously controlled. The part of the brain that deals with emotions is the limbic system. It’s thought that this part of the brain evolved fairly early on in human history, making it quite primitive. This explains why an emotional response is often quite straightforward, but very powerful: you want to cry, or run away, or shout. It’s because these responses are based around the need to survive.
Emotions are strongly linked to memory and experience. If something bad has previously happened to you, your emotional response to the same stimulus is likely to be strong. Understanding this link to memory and values gives you the key to managing your emotional response. Your emotional responses don’t necessarily have much to do with the current situation, or to reason, but you can overcome them with reason and by being aware of your reactions.”

The NGOs with extra support from school psychologist will train the teachers and how to recognize the problems of the students, how to use emotional management and treat the issues. During this 7 day training, school management will learn how to make the new colleagues adopt the successful method to their daily work. The host of this activity will be the Spanish NGO, as their field of expertise is emotional management.

3 Project management meetings will also done to support these phases, one Kick Off Meeting in Romania, in the end of November in 2019, one Middle Meeting in Portugal, in September 2020, and one Evaluation Meeting in August 2021, in Romania. In each of these meetings, 2-2 decision making staff of all 9 entities have to attend, so 18 people in total.

Before and after the training, the local governments aided by NGOs and schools, do a wide and deeper research (IO1) on national and international level on social media dependency, cross reference with the school problems and do a compared study on the participating countries. The baseline of the research is the needs analysis made before applying to this project. After the training, the participants have to share their knowledge with their colleagues and all who participate in the complete project has to implement the learnt methods into their everyday work. This process will be assisted by the NGOs, yet the major leader of the implementation will be the school. As one of the final results of the project we make a guidebook (IO2) of the
used methodology and the results of its implementation. Thus everyone else who shows interests in such solution could freely access to our results.

These 5 & 8 day long events are key elements of the project, as they are the opportunities for the participating teachers to see in action all the methods they learnt during the training. They can experience how their colleagues use emotional management tools in the everyday work. With 3 events all in all, everyone has the chance to visit and see how the teachers work in the other participating countries. Also we provide opportunities for better understanding by guest lecturing in the hosting schools.

To disseminate the outcomes of the project, mainly the 2 Intellectual Outputs, each NGO will be in charge of implementing a Multiplier Event for  elevant target groups, Romania for 50 Romanian citizens and 10 foreigners, while Portugal and Spain, for 30-30 national citizens and 5-5 foreigners. These will be done in July 2021.