The Project context

The BIS project has been financed within the Communitarian Programme named Lifelong Learning Programme (LLP) – sub programme GRUNDTVIG.

LLP supports the European cooperation on the field of the education and the training.

The aim of the Grundtvig programme is to respond to the double educational challenge of, on the one hand, the large number of adults who left school early (or, as in the case of many migrants, never had the possibility to receive a school education) and, on the other hand, an ageing population. Adult education helps to address these challenges by enabling both categories of individuals to improve and update their knowledge and competences.

Rationale

Nowadays the migratory flows are rising exponentially. Many scientific studies stress the discomforts coming from the arrival in a new country, with all those problems related to the reception and to the integration process: people feel the sensation of disharmony, the difficulties related to the loss of their professional skills, the fear of not being able to support their families, the sense of isolation; families, in the new country, feel not being able to guide their children in the process of acculturation (l. Ederling, E.J.Knorth-Leiden University, NE; V. Pavlopoulos, GR).

In literature, the term \"acculturation\" indicates the dimension where individual subjects face on one hand, the pressures of their ethnic group for the keeping of the cultural traditions, and on the other those of the host society towards the assimilation of new cultural models.

These difficulties stress the pressing need of the commitment of the social actors to ensure modalities of participation capable to render accessible to the immigrants their rights in order to consent an overall governance of the migratory phenomenon through the cooperation of the social, educational and employment policies helping to remove the causes that generate a sense of uneasiness in immigrants, hampering the social cohesion.

AIMS - ACTIONS - PRODUCTS

In the process of acculturation, two issues are important to the immigrants: (a) how to keep their heritage of culture and identity? (b) how to keep contacts with the wider society? The study of the complex interactions of the acculturation process with those elements arising from the local contexts (cultural diversity, groups composition, attitudes and Government policies) is a real challenge for the psychological, educational and pedagogical research.

The project deals the issue on two levels:

1. the improvement of the knowledge and the skills both of the organizations and of the social workers involved in the integration process of the immigrants, through training and guided self-learning processes and through the elaboration of methodological tools (methodology of the Research Action);
2. the support of the immigrants in their social integration paths (improvement / enhancement of the competences, research of an appropriate professional context, elaboration of a personal project also involving the family, awareness of the parenting competences) through the testing of an innovative methodological tool: the Balance of Social Integration. It will include both those classic elements of the Balance of Competences (that all the partners already know) both those ones related to the experiences gained in the processes of integration, including the parenting competences. These ones, usually considered in very specialized aspects of the intervention (in cases of serious family disease) in BIS will be stressed as a positive factor fundamental for the integration of the person and its family in several contexts.

TOTAL DURATION OF THE BIS PROJECT: 24 months

START DATE: 01/10/2011

END DATE: 30/09/2013