Team spirit - support of inclusive education and environment in classes through sportive activities

The need of inclusivity in education grew even bigger due to effect of COVID-19 pandemic. It has been always needed not to exclude those pupils who have got some specific educational, physical, psychological, social, economic or any other difficulties, because such an exclusion would lead to more serious problems and not wanted and expected effects of pupils´ school education. There has been quite a lot of programmes including school assistants who help with educational side of the school performance of those with special needs. But there were not many activities which would focus on inclusive environment in the class, natural cooperation of pupils with those who struggle with specific learning disadvantages. We realised that there is such a tool which can be used as a natural way of inclusion support and has got very good side effects connected with good health, strong immunity system and raise of self-awareness. The tool which we wanted to shape during the project realisation was s port. We wanted to choose certain elements of sports and use them as inclusion activities which would support inclusive environment in the school classes and school society.

The main objective of the project was to find natural inclusive activities based on sport elements which would support inclusive environment in the school classes and would help those with specific or special needs to become equal and valuable part of the class. We wanted to support pupils' understanding of inclusivity and bring them personal experience about the differences in competition and cooperation attitudes. The support of mental and physical health of the pupils was another objective we wanted to achieve by the project realisation; build a stronger immune system and beat the beginnings of more serious psychological problems, such as feelings of loneliness, lack of motivation and depression which had arisen during the COVID-19 pandemic period in larger numbers. Sport collectives can bring the team spirit. Shared feelings of success make the success even bigger, shared feelings of failure can be an example of how other children cope with these difficult situations. Team of pupils in a competitive environment has to cooperate well to succeed and sport rules based on a fair-play system make the frame in which pupils learn how to respect the others.

The project started with kick-off where all the project tasks were consulted and distributed in more details. Each school created their own mascot which represented the country and had a certain character connected to sport and social skills. Pupils introduced themselves through on-line calls and introduced the mascots to their mates in other partner schools through associated project realised through an eTwinning platform. The eTwinning project was used for more intensive cooperation of pupils. The mascots played an important part during LLT activities based on sport collaborations and other cooperative games based on physical movement. All the participants of the LLT events were mixed in teams under the mascot names and evaluated activities and their gained experience through the main mascot values. There were 3 management meetings to organise the project and its activities and there were4 LLTs – each partner country prepared its LLT. Furthermore, during the project realisation partnership searched and shared the best practice sport activities which could be used for inclusion support of pupils in the classes. Each partner organised and developed 8 sportive activities which could be used for inclusion support based on their best practice, those evaluated as the best by each partner school were suggested for the guide book and then tested and evaluated by the pupils of all the partner schools. Those having the most positive feedback became a part of the interactive guide, were recorded and an introductory description was added. The LTTs program also included presentations and examples of many different collaborative and inclusive sportive activities in teams according to the LTT topic, so children who were very weak physically were also able to reach common success – which enlarged their self-esteem and affected their position in the team. Thanks to team cooperation the pupils understood that everybody has got a different potential and that the comparison of potentials brings only competition whereas understanding of differences brings cooperation. As an additional activity which brought the understanding of differences even deeper, we involved the associated partner school that deals with physically and mentally disabled pupils. These children participated in the LTT organised in the Czech Republic. Every other LTT had its own concrete topic chosen according to the specifics of the school (inclusion of younger pupils into the group of older ones, alternative physical activities which support inclusion, inclusion through team sports).

The expected project results were connected with the partner schools on the first level. There was a certain number of pupils and teachers who experienced the LTT events with inclusive sportive activities topics. There was even larger number of pupils who took part in the eTwinning cooperation and school study visits events. So, the project affected the pupils in the project target age group 10–15 years in the partner schools on a very wide range. Through the results' evaluation all the pupils who were involved in LTTs referred that their social skills, sportive skills, self-awareness and understanding of the difference between cooperation and competition improved thanks to participation in the project. We used the project webpage as one of the promotional and dissemination tool. Besides eTwinning and Erasmus+ Results platforms, the project webpage was the main place to store and share the project outcomes and outputs. The interactive guide “Sportive activities as a tool for inclusion support“ was the main project output; it includes best practice examples developed by the schools during the project implementation. So, any school interested in the topic of inclusive environment support in classes through sportive activities can use it. The overall project result leads to the improvement of social, sportive, related health and educational skills, not only in partners’ schools, but also in any other school that will be interested in this topic and will implement the created and shared best examples.