Social Club Project in Foggia: Two Days of Training with Teachers and Students
Two intense days took place at ENAC Puglia, nell’ambito del progetto europeo Erasmus+ Social Club – Promoting Social Inclusion through Culture Action (KA220-VET Cooperation Partnership, 2024-2026), the initiative bringing together five European organisations in a shared commitment to reducing cultural distance and discrimination among VET (Vocational Education and Training) students.
The first session, dedicated to teachers, opened the training path with an introduction to the Social Club project and its objectives. Participants took part in the first Cultural Distance Monitor survey, a tool designed to measure perceptions and attitudes towards cultural diversity, and were introduced to the Action Plan and the Bridge Lab, the teaching materials developed within the project to bring topics such as inclusion, respect for differences, and combating stereotypes into the classroom. The session closed with a self-assessment activity, helping teachers begin reflecting on their own role in fostering a more inclusive school environment.
Thurdays 10th and Friday 11th september, the training opened up to students, who took centre stage in a series of hands-on activities built around the Social Club project’s modules:
- Recognising different forms of discrimination — sexism, racism, ableism, heterosexism and islamophobia — through term-definition matching worksheets and real-life examples, learning to correctly name phenomena that are often invisible or normalised.
- Stereotipi e pregiudizi, affrontati con un percorso di riflessione critica in piccoli gruppi, per imparare a riconoscerli nel linguaggio quotidiano e nei media.Stereotypes and prejudice, explored through critical reflection in small groups, to help students recognise them in everyday language and in the media.
- An active listening exercise, designed to build empathy and strengthen peer-to-peer dialogue, in line with the project’s goal of developing students’ relational skills.
- Designing the “ideal school”, imagined and drawn directly by the students, giving voice to their own vision of a more welcoming school environment.
- A European cultural exchange, creating virtual postcards containing a thought to share with students from other partner countries of the project.
The two days in Foggia represent one of the training milestones planned within the project, and show how joint work between teachers and students is central to the Social Club methodology: not a top-down approach, but a process built together, starting from listening to and directly involving those who experience school every day.
