Projects

MYSTY – MyStory: Digital Storytelling Toolbox for Diversity Training in Schools

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The MYSTY Project provides tools for teachers to share and embed innovative teaching practice to enhance awareness of cultural diversity. At the same time it will increase pupils’ cultural awareness and expression and enhance their social and civic competences. MYSTY will also support teachers’ and pupils’ digital competences. MYSTY involves the collection, the editing and the uploading of digital stories to the MYSTY Digital Storytelling Toolbox website. These stories focus on ‘food’, ‘family’ and ‘festival’ and act as a platform for diversity awareness and digital upskilling. Teachers will be trained in the use of digital media for storytelling and pupils will conduct and lead on their collection and editing.

Our international project includes 8 organizations from four EU countries: Austria, UK, Hungary and Italy. One of MSYTY’s main aims is the enhancement of schools’ cultural activity, raising (inter)cultural awareness and the introduction of the thinking about diversity. And our main tools are digital stories, the methods and techniques of digital storytelling.

MYSTY is a two-years-long project with the idea of giving children complex tools and encourage them to tell us their stories about food, family and festivals. Our goal is to give them (and their teachers, youth workers) a tool, and develop training materials which will help them achieving greater competence in cultural and intercultural awareness, civics, digital upscaling and in the field of critical thinking. We are also developing course materials, hand-to-hand with our pupils to help disadvantaged children telling their stories too.

The project’s main activities:

• Developing tools and training materials for teachers and youth workers, which will help them in the process of integrating digital storytelling in the national and also in the school’s curriculum
• Developing a pupil-guide, which will help the children in the process of digital storytelling, from the theory of making digital stories, to the practical processes with helpful tips and advices, with the idea of making an easy-to-use guide
• A thematic digital story collection, which can be used by schools and communities too

The MYSTY Project is driven by the principle that innovative teaching resources form a part of broader pedagogic strategies that can actively help tackle issues of diversity. It facilitates actions that address issues of diversity common across the EU as highlighted in the Paris Declaration, 2015. The importance of enhancing social, civic and intercultural competences, critical thinking and media literacy as well as fostering the education of disadvantaged children and young people were at the heart of the Paris Declaration and MYSTY’s aim and objectives are closely aligned with many of the recommendations made in the declaration.

With a network of teachers, media and education academics and technicians, the main objective is to create an online resource called the MYSTY Digital Storytelling Toolbox.

In order to achieve this overall objective, there are three sub-objectives:

• Develop Curriculum Integration Methodologies to support school use of the Toolbox
• Create a Pupil Guide for Digital Storytelling to facilitate the creation of digital stories
• Produce a Collection of Themed Digital Stories for use in school and community settings

MYSTY seeks to bring the participating organisations together to develop and share practices, in order to produce resources that other schools can use. This will enable teachers across the EU to develop a shared understanding of the key issues, which will help them in their practice. The Consortium consists of eight Partners, bringing together a balanced mix of high education institutions, schools and NGOs from the UK, Austria, Hungary and Italy. All have expertise in the development of skills for teachers with the aim of creating intercultural and digital learning for pupils in European schools. Coming from different national experiences of migration they make a varied and committed Consortium.

The methodology is based on a balanced collaborative approach with different Partners taking responsibility for and leading on different outputs and activities to maximise each Partners’ individual expertise as well as reinforce the shared EU added value principle.

MYSTY will have three key impacts:

• Participants (pupils and teachers) will be encouraged to reappraise their attitude towards minority groups within their peer group. It will enable them to reassess prejudice, re-calibrate their views and attitudes towards minority groups and re-educate them in diversity matters
• Teachers will embrace new / digital media technologies and pupils will realise the educational potential for technologies associated primarily for leisure, so affording a connection for effective and fun learning
• MYSTY will enable minority groups to share and spread their migration experience to other communities, groups, schools and civic organisations

The European Commission’s support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.