2017-

German-Turkish Initiative for Collaboration on Refugee Relief

All Together / Hep Beraber / Alle Zusammen

The project aims to collectively envision inclusive societies and develop practical creative tools for social cohesion to be implemented in formal and non-formal learning environments in Turkey and Germany where children and young people with and without refugee background and from diverse sociocultural backgrounds coexist, particularly in schools.

In line with this purpose, we brought a variety of relevant actors, experts, professionals from both countries together and we started out, in 2017, to collectively work on two basic and common questions:

1. What kind of inclusive learning materials can be developed for swiftly incorporating children with refugee background into social and educational life and encouraging them to be more active participants, while responding concrete needs of the field?

2. In order to contribute in building social cohesion as a reciprocal process, how can we collectively produce culture and arts based content aiming for common use by all children and youngsters?
Our project participants

In the past two years, around 40 experts from two countries such as educators, civil society actors, social service experts, teachers, academics, non-formal education experts, psychologists, creative drama instructors, museum pedagogues, art therapists, musicians and researchers came together and worked on different topics based on their areas of expertise and interests.

Considering different contextual needs of two countries six working groups transformed their shared ideas into tools of alternative education and concrete products which encourage active use of artistic expression such as, music, performance art, painting, sculpture, games, creative drama, dance.

Our project outputs

• adopt an inclusive learning approach and target to include all children with or without refugee background.
• focus on appreciating cultural diversity and multilingualism as a richness and emphasise the power of "non-formal education" in this field.
• provide tools for game based learning, develop creativity, empower skills for individual and collective expression, and therefore support practices of living together among children and youngsters.
• reinforce self-confidence of children with refugee or migrant background, enable them not to loose contact with their cultural heritage in the process of adapting to a new environment
• encourage children, through innovative tools of game and art-based learning, in learning their family languages as well as the language of the society they are living in.
All the products are available on www.germanturkishinitiative.org as downloadable and printable versions.