The School of Design and Creative Arts at Loughborough University will host the second SELAM project meeting from the 29th to the 31st of July 2019.

‘Learning Self-Awareness & Self-Management to Eliminate Bullying and create peer support schemes in the immigrant concentrated schools’ is a EU funded project led by AFYONILMEM, Afyonkarahisar, Turkey, and involves partners from Malta, Italy, Lithuania, Norway and the UK.

The main objective of this project is to empower and inform students by using self-awareness and self-management tools as its core so that they can monitor and reflect on their own behaviour and deepen their understanding of its impact on immigrants.

Dr Antonia Liguori, Lecturer in Applied Storytelling, and Professor Mike Wilson, Professor of Drama, are leading the production of the contents for the two main intellectual outputs that will be produced as part of this strategic partnership.

‘In this project we are proposing to use Digital Storytelling as a tool for inclusive education to support students and teachers to better understand and potentially identify bullying in their classroom. The idea – explains Dr Liguori – is to use creative practices to facilitate conversations around challenges and opportunities that cultural diversity can bring in a local community and trigger mutual learning processes within groups of students’.

Digital Storytelling will be integrated as a teaching strategy in the Guidelines for teachers and in the e-learning platform that will be developed for the pilot phase.

Piloting of the e-learning platform will begin in Turkey, Italy and Malta in 2020 and will be implemented in schools where immigrants and other students suffering from peer bullying have already been identified.