During the day, yesterday, an international symposium took place on inclusive schools, with participation from national and international experts in the fields of sports, inclusion and childhood. Professors Pilar Escotorin and Joaquín Fagoaga took part in the symposium, representing our university.
When is a school truly inclusive? Is it possible to imagine a school where children don’t exclude others? These are some of the questions that motivated the European Commission to fund a project called EBE: “Evidence-Based Education: European strategic model for school inclusion”, led by the University of Perugia and in which the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona is also participating.
The project involves an innovative programme that includes pro-social and socio-emotional competences into a unique programme - called the PROSEL Programme, and helps train primary teachers to become leaders and experts in the programme. Twenty schools - ten from Catalonia and ten from Perugia, Italy - have applied and continue to apply the PROSEL programme and a further twenty schools (in both countries) have agreed to participate as members of a control group.
The symposium on the 13th was jointly organised by the Laboratory for Applied Research at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the international summer school Sportmeet, to provide theoretical and applied knowledge, as well as share good practices. These good practices will allow professionals who work with children and who want to create structural change to move forward in terms of methods to conceive of and build schools, families and a more inclusive society.
The symposium was divided into two round tables. Our physiotherapy professor Joaquín Fagoaga was one of the participants in the first one, entitled: “Inclusive schools and societies: clues for intervention”. The table was moderated by Doctor Escotorin. The second table was entitled: “Inclusion of people with different abilities: a new perspective from sports, culture and society”.
