Impressions about the project (3)

Also found at the “Daniela Cuciuc” Secondary School in Piatra Neamț, where Mrs. Ioana Roxana Iordache, remedial education teacher, is part of our project. Here is what he told us:

“I started the project with a number of 24 beneficiaries, 14 of whom have special educational needs and 10 at risk of dropping out of school, most of them from single-parent families or with limited financial means. It was a challenge and a joy right from the beginning, the activities carried out were of remedial education in the subjects of the curricular area Communication in Romanian, Mathematics and sciences, Visual Arts and practical skills, but also socialization games and STEAM activities; personal autonomy games (puzzles with “emotions” and the “positive attitude puzzle”). All these activities had as operational objectives the consolidation of the knowledge gained, the students realizing that they can have positive or negative emotions, which they can manage properly, but also that all the actions undertaken have repercussions in their personal and social life.

All activities addressed to children in the main target group aimed at better educational inclusion, both for children at risk of dropping out of school and for children with CES. A better educational inclusion contributes directly to the degree of social inclusion, the project approach being an integrated one, addressing the entire social context that directly influences social inclusion, through a community-child-school-parent approach. Practically, this unitary involvement, through the involvement of all factors, can be the secret of success.

The main objective of the remedial activities was the integrated approach based on student participation, personalization and interactivity. We aimed at the implementation of inclusive activities structured on the principle of desegregation, the creation of educational support tools with long-term impact, the promotion of the involvement of all relevant actors at the community level, the development of proactivity for all the beneficiaries of the activities in the project (here I mean both the children in the group the main target, as well as the parents in the secondary one). As we expected, all the students in the project had a good and very good evolution, especially on the affective-emotional side, although the cognitive side was not neglected either, but V.’s evolution was a spectacular one: from the shy child, incapable of socialization and inter-relationship with colleagues from whom he felt excluded, shunned, isolated, the self-possessed child, capable of initiating dialogues with colleagues, role-playing, like a real team leader.”

Asked about the usefulness of these projects and to whom they should mainly be addressed in the future, the teacher told us:

“At the level of the main target group consisting of children and young people at risk of dropping out of school, the project identified the following main needs: the need for a personalized educational act, the need for an individual and integrated approach that takes into account the entire social and educational context that affects each child , the need to allocate additional resources from among educational and social experts to work with each case, the need to adapt educational tools to a high degree of interactivity, the need for social support, the need for personal development, especially motivation and self-confidence, the need participation in segregated integrative activities with children who are not exposed to risks.

For children with special educational requirements, we have identified the following needs: the need for desegregation, the intense need for personalized support activities, the need to develop individual skills, the need for integrated psychopedagogical counseling.

A series of urgent needs were also identified at the level of the secondary target group made up of educational and social experts, as well as parents: the need for counseling, the need for exposure to concrete work models and successful integrated approaches for working with vulnerable children, the need of permanent professional communication and improving the skills to identify and address these vulnerabilities, the need for permanent access to new information and best practice models, the need for information for parents on concrete ways to support the educational act, the need for awareness of the importance of education in social integration. Although it is called a “secondary target group”, its role is overwhelming in the educational and social integration of children.

Therefore, the project achieved this goal by building flexible and interactive intervention tools – personal development workshops, support groups, workshops, community support points. All these tools allowed the individualized approach to the needs of GT right in the community from which it originates