The consortium of the DO-IT project – a KA2 project co-founded by the Erasmus Plus Programme – carried out the first Transnational Partner Meeting in Katerini (Greece) from 5th to 8th September 2021.
The Transnational Meeting has been hosted by the 2nd Vocational High School of Katerini, a school that serves around 600 students, aged 16 – 19, with 80 teachers and comprises four different sectors (Informatics, Healthcare & Welfare, Agriculture/Food Technology/Nutrition and Business/Economics).
Through the overall meeting, the partners had the chance to meet and discover good practices of migrants/refugees integration in the education system during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The 2nd Vocational High School of Katerini
The 2nd Vocational High School of Katerini has opened its doors to show the structure of the school itself, including the specialised classrooms for students with a migrant background that, thanks to the work of specialised teachers, encourage their integration into the school.
The school indeed makes the effort to address the problems linked to students with a migrant background and puts in place good practices to support their teaching and learning procedures. Immigrant students, apart from the specialised classes, take lectures together with the other Greek students, to encourage their integration. Immigrant students are also entitled to take Greek language classes. Most of them come indeed from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Pakistan.
The school provides a wide range of activities, for example nursing, ICT, cooking, craft to prepare its students for the labour market.
During the lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the school has managed to arrange classes online, through the Cisco Webex Platform. The immigrant students were welcomed to join in, and they could attend specific lectures too, to meet their special needs.
All the students had access to additional learning material, plus the possibility to borrow a digital tool (laptop, tablet) in order to carry out their learning activities at home.
Municipality of Katerini
Another good practice example displayed and showed to the consortium of the DO-IT project was the “Roma inclusion and empowerment” project financed by the Municipality of Katerini.
The project is still ongoing and ending in October 2022 (but planning to continue afterwards). “Roma inclusion and empowerment” is meant to encourage the migrants integration in the local community. For this reason, it focuses on:
- Employment,
- Education,
- Social support, and
The Roma community that benefits from the project lives in the refugee camp “Kato Milia”, not far from Katerini city.
The Municipality’s representatives, responsible for the project implementation, visit the camp nearly every day and refugees are encouraged to take part in several activities, such as visits to the public library, after-school activities, and summer camps for the young ones.
The Kato Milia refugees camp
As an example of migrants integration, the Kato Milia refugees camp has put in place good practices to address the teaching and learning problems of refugees and migrants, during the cOVI-19 pandemic too.
Together with the support of the training coordinator, a translator and educators, the camp allows its young people to learn and grow through informal-education activities and support them with after-school activities.
Questionnaires and Dissemination
Through the time of the Transnational Meeting, the consortium has worked on the final version of the 5 questionnaires to be delivered to different stakeholders:
- youth workers;
- researchers;
- teachers;
- migrants associations members;
Moreover, they’ve planning the next steps of the dissemination and communication strategy, presenting the new-born Facebook page of the DO-IT project and setting out the guidelines for the dissemination ahead.