ClimActiC: Citizenship for Climate – Building Bridges between Citizenship and Science for Climate Adaptation

Intends to: articulate citizens, science and public policies in the management of adaptation to climate change; deepen the knowledge about environmental challenges and processes of behavioural and societal change at the local level; create and encourage spaces for communication and co-creation between scientists, young people, activists, economic agents and policymakers; produce recommendations for a more resilient and adapted North region.

LIDA: Learning Inclusion in a Digital Age - Belonging and Find a Voice in a Changing Europe

The overarching objective of 'Learning Inclusion in a Digital Age. To Belong and Find a Voice in a Changing Europe' is to develop country specific and pan-European cultures of learning inclusion and active citizenship in digitally joined-up educational eco-systems incorporating education policy and society (Level 1), the education sector and its institutions (Level 2) vulnerable adult minorities and educators, professionals and learners (Level 3).
A range of innovative cultures of learning inclusion utilising distant, online and blended resources are created for the growing number of vulnerable adult minorities in Europe, particularly migrants and refugees. This group face health, employment, gender, cultural and educational challenges on arrival and even as second or third generations grow up in Europe. This is compounded by lack of access to the skills and competencies required to become socially included. All European societies face the risk that vulnerable adult minorities will remain spectators in society without the lifelong capacity to be active citizens capable of clearly expressing their needs, identities and sense of belonging.
In LIDA, vulnerable adult minorities understood as refugees and migrants, and their teachers and associated professionals engage with these issues and learn how to create cultures of inclusion and a particular kind of voice expressing belonging and active citizenship supported by digital learning resources, such as digital narratives.
The LIDA project outputs and resources are: policy and scientific publications, social media, digital stories, a repository of distant, online and blended resources, digital handbooks and reports.
They are shared on an open assess, multilingual LIDA project website maintained after the project. Relationships built with associated partners, including European Association for the Education of Adults, UNESCO’s network of Learning Cities and Smart Cities Associations in European countries ensure the scalability, impact, sustainability and future dissemination of the project.

EduTransfer: Learning from diverse educational settings: Transferability of promising practices in the 2020 Horizon

This participatory research analyses the possibilities of transference between educational institutions, of promising educational practices that take as basis problem based learning, as a cooperative learning methodology. Therefore it involves mainstream schools and out of school educational institutions, the alternative learning arenas. The starting point of the project is the concern about the need to find more concerted forms of action in education, which involve the different actors in promoting a sense of belonging and commitment to education by young people and teachers, promoting greater success in contributing to the reduction of the social and individual problem of early school leaving and early leaving from education and training; dimensions on which the project's relevance rests. Also relevant is the creation of spaces within the educational institutions, where young people have the opportunity to exert their citizenship and crucial competences, by participating in the identification, decision making and action to improve their life contexts. The innovative dimension of the project emerges from the strong articulation between researchers, teachers and young people, in the construction of participatory practices for solving real problems, identified by the young people themselves, and that result in community involvement, allowing a detailed analysis by the research team with the contribution of the participants. The research standing point is based on a sociological perspective that argues for the need to go beyond the identification of problems and to collaborate in the construction of measures that contribute to their resolution. In a coherent articulation with the theoretical principles of a sensitive research that engages in the processes it observes and analyses, ethnography is the main method of collecting and analysing data, complemented by focus group discussion, which stands on the participants voices. The use of these complementary methods will allow the matching of the voices of the researchers, more sustained on ethnographic observ

MIND the Gaps - Media Literacy Towards Youth Social Inclusion

Is a ERASMUS+ KA2 project that uses a participatory intervention based on programming training and multimedia open educational resources development to empower young people to develop media literacy, critical thinking and to be able to share knowledge and collaboratively solve problems in partnership with young people (15-18 years old) from other European countries, in a non-formal context. This means that the project is in line with the New European Youth Policy (2019-2027) since it will develop new and innovative ways to achieve the priorities that are set out in national and EU policy: ENGAGE, CONNECT and EMPOWER young people through innovation, quality and recognition of youth work. MINDtheGaps impact envisage is to contribute to develop innovative practices at both partners¿ countries and EU level to guarantee ¿the right to quality and inclusive education, training and lifelong learning in order to maintain and acquire skills that enable [everyone] to participate fully in society and manage successfully transitions in the labour market (European Pillar of Social Rights, 2017). They are also in sync with the targets of Europe 2020 Agenda, namely at the educational level, contributing to a decrease of early school leaving and to diminish the levels of people in or at risk of poverty/social exclusion and the number of NEETs.

REGAP - Reducing the Educational Gap for Migrants and Refugees in EU Countries, with highly relevant e-learning resources offering strong social belonging

ReGap is an acronym for “Reducing the Educational Gap for migrants and refugees in EU countries with highly relevant e-learning resources offering strong social belonging”.

The ReGap project is co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme, and aims to extend high quality, culturally sensitive open access e-learning resources to adult migrants and refugees of both genders in EU countries. Building on findings from the USA and our Erasmus+ project (Advenus) we know that reducing the education gap for migrants and refugees in European countries will secure employment and social belonging opportunities.

The group we are intending to reach, is not in any way uniform. It has proven difficult to reach all. Which is why we are suggesting making some changes regarding teaching methods. This requires on-line learning activities that are culturally and gender sensitive and support in-person learning activities in the context of each European country. The ReGap project will continue to use online- learning as a basis. This will be uniform for all European countries. However, there are differences within Europe, which we need to address. In-learning in the individual countries, with information specific for the country they are staying, will do this. This will make the project far-reaching and the information will still be accurate and useful.

We also know that a significant barrier to engagement in on-line learning is that on-line resources are not deemed relevant and fail to engage with the learners needs for knowledge about employment, health, social security, schooling and justice in the new country. To counteract this barrier, we suggest implementing the findings from a recent Stanford study. Research has demonstrated that social identity threat can impair a person’s working memory and academic performance. They managed to apply activities removing the social-identity threat, a fear of being seen as less competent because of social identity, leading to participants not completing MOOCS. This was achieved by creating a sense of belonging, with an online activity at the beginning of the course. The results being highly successful. We wish to include their activities, and in addition have online-groups for discussion and participation at certain times to even increase the sense of belonging. The ReGap project will develop on-line learning activities that enhance the contextual knowledge of migrants and refugees across key topics and their sense of social belonging.

The ReGap project is a follow-up of the LIBE project, and the Advenus project.

CodeIWP - Commitment to Democracy through Increasing Women's Participation

Parliaments are the most important floors for the implementation of Gender Equality, Women’s Empowerment, and voters (men and women) sensitization towards equality and towards the social profits from valuing women’s contribution to National and European (N&E) development and progress. The low percentages of women’s participation in the European Parliament according to the 2014 elections indicate that short term measures and campaigns just before the elections are not as efficient as it was expected. This project aims at the continuous encouraging/increasing the participation of women as voters and as candidates in both the N&E elections and the political life. The partnership is purposefully designed to include four countries with low percentages of female representation in National and European decision making bodies (Cyprus, Lithuania, Latvia, Portugal) and one model country (Finland) with relatively high percentages of female representation. The project' s objectives:1) to bring together and engage youth representatives, media stakeholders, politicians and researchers from each country in the analysis of the existing barriers to participation in European Policy Making and in the preparation of an integrated strategy for increasing youth and female participation in N&E decision making bodies; 2) provide face-to-face and on line animation training for women who aspire to a career in N&E politics; 3) provide on line workshops and participatory seminars for voters, men and women, from a variety of social and professional groups for promoting equation, equity and democratic participation; 4) built-up an electronic forum and website, linked with the electronic social media, for promoting the aim and objectives of the project; 5) establish an on line tool for gathering the citizens' opinions; 6) produce a TV short film for advertising the campaign and the project' s aims; 7) establish a European Network for Women in Politics (EUNWPOL) for sustainable volunteer engagement.

Breaking the chains of social exclusion? An intersectional perspective of equality of resources and affective equality in education

European PhD
In the last decades, perceptions about welfare have changed and recipients have been accused by mass media, politicians, and by public opinion in general, of dependency, laziness and even fraud. This perception was also on the basis of active social policies, created to reinforce individual responsibility and ‘autonomy’. This thesis has tried to challenge some of the stereotypes specifically related to poor women, showing the idiosyncrasies of their paths, highlighting their strategies to try cope with poverty and to offer a better future for their children within a context of inequality.
The distinct theoretical contribution of this work is the articulation of three different theoretical approaches, equality studies, Lahire’s contextualist and dispositionalist approach and intersectionality, in order to capture these women’s idiosyncratic paths, intersecting gender, motherhood, socioeconomic status and ‘race’ at different levels, according to Baker and Lynch’s dimensions of equality of condition, redistribution, relationality, education, representation and respect and recognition.
Consequently, seven sociological portraits were created, based on sixty in-depth interviews, with twenty women from northern Portugal. In addition, contacts were established with public and private organisations and ten exploratory interviews were held with seventeen key informants (social and education professionals who work with ISA recipients). For the sociological portraits’ interpretation, women’s social paths were divided between expected and unexpected (idiosyncratic).
Besides a clear intergenerational reproduction of poverty, characterised by the lack of economic resources, participants’ social exclusion was deeply connected with affective inequalities, such as abuse and neglect in early childhood and domestic violence in adulthood, which have had emotional, health, economic and educational implications.
However, despite inequality, poor women had strategies to deal with their lives’ constraints. Most interviewed women had a defined strategy for upward social mobility, especially concerning their children’s future and their agency was thus strongly related to children’s care and the prioritization of their needs.
Our research revealed that the income support allowance’s value is clearly insufficient for the families’ needs. In fact, it enables mere survival, keeping the interviewed women in a state of dependency towards welfare, conflicting with the objectives of ‘autonomy’ for which they were designed.
The study offers suggestive evidence for policy development in the areas of social justice, such as care, education, work, welfare, housing and health. In sum, this research’s perspective highlights that the ability to make plans, the motivation and the possibility of ‘autonomy’ are largely dependent on socioeconomic and affective conditions.

Cultural Practices, Values and Social Representations of Higher Education Students in Porto

Project about cultural practices, values and expectations of higher education students