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Description
The aim of the project is to develop a teaching method using sport and its infrastructure (sports stadiums) to educate young people about the values of tolerance and multiculturalism in an attractive way and to sensitise them to discriminatory behaviour. We will elaborate a lesson scenario and educational resources for participants. We will organize seminars for educators who, in cooperation with Polish sports clubs, will conduct workshops for young people at modern football stadiums. The educational resources will refer to, among others, the history and multicultural tradition of specific football clubs. Through references to Jewish, German and Russian founders, athletes and activists, we would like to show that sport has enormous potential, which can be used to unite different social groups (including national, ethnic or religious groups) and promote tolerance. During the workshops we will use motifs present in modern football, including well-known figures: football stars coming from different cultures and backgrounds and representing different religions. As part of the project, we will launch workshops promoting tolerance and multiculturalism in four Polish stadiums. We are implementing the project in cooperation with partners, incliding: CUKUNFT Jewish Association, Internationaler Bund Poland, Intermezzo Ungdomsorganisasjon (Norway), Association ‘Center for Structural Development’ (Romania). The partner from Norway will help to elaborate educational resources and will conduct training in Norway presenting experiences of Norwegian sports clubs in implementing similar initiatives. The continuation of the project will be a bigger initiative ‘Lessons at the stadium’implementing its goals. Under this initiative we plan to build a broad partnership of training institutions, sports clubs, stadiums and NGOs, promoting tolerance and counteracting discrimination.
Summary of project results
The most important problem that we wanted to solve was the increase in discriminatory, xenophobic and racist attitudes among school youth observed in Poland.
The aim of our project was to create workshops that would attractively convey to young people the values of tolerance and multiculturalism, and make them sensitive to discriminatory behavior.
It is obvious that virtually all cities and regions in Poland have a centuries-old tradition of multi-ethnic, peaceful coexistence of Poles and people of many other nationalities. Unfortunately, these traditions are often forgotten, or treated in a folkloristic way, they do not reach children and young people in a convincing way.
Sport and its surroundings, e.g. sports stadiums, are an excellent carrier of content and a place for implementing educational projects. Due to its emotional capacity and charge, sport is unfortunately also used as a place for the expression of xenophobic and aggressive attitudes, and was partly also a propaganda tool for many systems and ideologies. However, we wanted to confirm that sport and stadiums can also be used in modern education: just like many European stadiums, a number of educational projects are carried out, we carried out such workshops at 5 stadiums in Poland. We used football and sports themes to show a positive message from the world of sports and football stars: tolerance and integration, stigmatizing discrimination, racism and intolerance.
We prepared materials, staff and carried out a series of workshops for school children.
The concept of the workshops is based on the use of the power of sport, mainly football, to construct attractive workshops on diversity, counteracting various forms of discrimination and exclusionary attitudes.
We managed to attract several large football clubs and stadium operators to the project, which is why the workshops are very popular.
We conducted anti-discrimination workshops for 562 participants aged 14-18.
According to the evaluation, participants learn many new things about discriminatory attitudes, and at the same time we try to encourage them to think and analyze their own and observed attitudes towards other people.
We managed to persuade 5 large football clubs to cooperate and at whose stadiums we carried out our workshops.
The clubs support us in recruitment and also try to benefit from the success of the workshops by using them in their communication channels.
We also strengthened our organization: in addition to organizing promotion and media matters, we started promising cooperation with several people: trainers, authors and volunteers.
Summary of bilateral results
We took advantage of our partner''s knowledge in organizing training and educational projects on similar topics.