Letter from the Coordinators

Dear educators of Europe,

The idea of Erasmus Minus Bullying programme (in short EMB from now on) was created by the need to face bullying as a phenomenon in our European schools in consistent, innovative ways, in collaboration with students and teachers “from the four corners of Europe”.

EMB was an exchange of good practices and training of students and teachers. One of its aims was to create intellectual outputs that can serve as teaching material and resources for European teachers, with the active participation and contribution of our students. In this guide you will find everything which was produced during the two years of the project as well as ideas on how to use the material or how to implement the most successful techniques we used with our students, both in our schools during the 2 years and also in the 7 short - term training sessions we had in different countries.

In short, in the first year we were trained on ICT tools and platforms and we dealt with the social and psychological aspects of bullying. In the second year we worked on the topic of cyber-bullying, the criminal aspects of it and on prevention matters. We produced a book with some of our best products, a CD with the songs created in the 10 countries, a DVD with the 10 anti-bullying films we created, a short dictionary in print and CD form, of words related to the topic of bullying and games with them, and 7 DVDs with documentation of our short - term training sessions. Our EMB wikispace webpage, our YouTube channel and our blog are giving a comprehensive overview of our common work.

In the following pages you will read Prefaces for the various activities we organized. They are meant to answer basic questions like why we chose the activity, what expectations we had, what information we collected, what was the overall benefit for our students, what academic and social skills they acquired and how these activities can be used in our classes or how they can be incorporated in the school curriculum.

It has been obvious since a long time that we are very proud of our EMB and very happy to have coordinated such wonderful partners. We had the chance to learn from them a lot. We are not the same persons. We feel - and we hope it is not our imagination- that we acquired many people’s skills, we became better communicators, and we learnt from our mistakes. We also enjoyed every moment of it. And we believe that this project will give us more great moments through our efforts to disseminate the good results and through sustainability actions.  

We want to express our satisfaction and gratitude to our partners from Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain and Turkey for the hard work they have contributed in order to meet the demands of this so challenging project.

We thank everybody for the trust they showed by giving us the opportunity to coordinate EMB. We also thank our National Agency, IKY, for the opportunity we were given to work on an Erasmus+ project.

We can’t claim that we eliminated the phenomenon, of course. But we are sure that we went to the right direction. Our schools (teachers, parents and students) have been sensitized, we know better what to do, we have used and recommended different tools, and we have shared this knowledge in different communication and educational platforms. We have changed.

We are closing with our favourite poet Kavaphis: “Once you have climbed the first step, you have already accomplished a lot”. “Now that we have climbed the ladder of knowledge a little further, what is the feeling?” we wonder. Our feeling is great. It is lighter up here, having accomplished the most difficult part. To learn, understand and change. Now we can apply what we know. We can experience better days at school, and, hopefully, we can enjoy feelings of accomplishment and confidence.

We will continue to work for the fulfillment of our goal. We hope that this guide will be of help and inspiration to anyone involved in the teaching process, which is a life trip for us and we believe we can really travel light if we can stay young and curious. We are entitled to the dream, after all, because we are teachers, so close to the real dreamers, children! As teachers, we also know to our hearts that a better future for Europe goes through education.

The coordinators

Mania Kouroussi                                 Arianna Vagourdi