GUESS WHO?

Introduction: A.E.P.E.R. in 2015 and 2016 organized two youth exchanges (in France and in Italy) in collaboration with the OMERO association, an association for people with visual disability and some other European organizations. Exchanges involved young people with and without physical disabilities (visual and auditory) using theater as an essential tool. The experience was extremely interesting for the participants, for the families and for the organizations. In fact, it has allowed us to develop greater sensitivity and educational tools in relation to the theme of communication, coexistence and special need of people with disadvantages. For this reason we would like to carry out a new project focusing on people with visual disability.
Project name: GUESS WHO? ". The decision to call this project with the name of the famous board game was born from a childhood memory linked to it, where each card represents a character with different characteristics that make it unique and …different from the others. To win the game the participants must guess the character chosen by one's opponent, they must do questions, in fact the more questions you ask, the more possibility to win you have.

Who: mixed national groups. The idea is to involve 3 European countries (Italy...). Each national group will be composed of 6 teenagers between 15 and 18 years old (3 with vision problems and 3 without sensory deficits). Each national group will be led by 2 youth leaders.
When: summer 2019 (the end of August) or winter holiday.
Where: Bergamo (Italy).
Why: Create an opportunity for all participants to grow, have experience with diversity and stereotypes created by others but also by ourselves. The project wants to involve mixed groups because teenagers with visual disability lack of experiences, including opportunities for exchange and meeting with their peers, but on the other side teenagers will have the chance to approach a reality that they may not know directly. Inclusion is not meant to be the central theme of the project, but the facilitator tool to make teenagers think about how disability, and more generally diversity: it is a transversal theme, which extends to other issues such as, for example, that of identity. This is not a marginal topic, especially given the involvement of young people. In fact, the theme of identity plays a key role in the everyday life of teenagers, who are experiencing a period in which the affirmation of their identity plays an important part of their existence, as well as their own research. Beyond this need to "affirm" and "find oneself", there are other themes such as: prejudices and stereotypes, tolerance and active participation.
The theme of this exchange will be sport, in its various forms. Through it we want to invite the participants, outside the formal framework of education, to think together, but also to experience physically what the prejudices and stereotypes and the difficulties of experiencing great and small difficulties on themselves mean failures and frustrations in a multinational context. Sport is an area in which the individual can positively reflect himself, improving his self-image, feeling fulfilled and satisfied in order to achieve a goal, experiencing different emotional states, avoiding isolation and going out from family contexts like the family and the school and opening up to independence. In fact, sport is a privileged vehicle for inclusion because in sport we are all equal and we tend to value the uniqueness of each individual, because the differences between the role reflect in a certain sense the differences that depend on ethnicity, skin color, geographical origin or physical or cognitive deficits.

Activities: see attached timetable

Budget: ‘GUESS WHO?’ will be applied to the next Erasmusplus’ deadline (30th of April 2019). If approved the program will cover travel, food and accomodation’s expenses.

Contact:
Rosita Poloni – Elena Signorino
europe@aeper.it