European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE EUROPEAN IDENTITY IN THE SCHOOL ... 237Respect for others and the promotion of every human potential will bekey components of that learning community. Everyone has somethingto offer to their learning community and it is important to set upmechanisms that allow that diverse intellectual wealth to be shared.Thus, those schools will combat meanness and derision and willconcentrate on the multi-faceted and multiple intelligence of youths,education staff members, parents and other groups from the localcommunity who are able to support intellectual activities.Respect for everyone will be expressed in the pedagogical support,assistance or guidance structures set up for pupils and education staff.It will also be expressed by the career guidance structures for youths whoare learning a profession. All that will be done in collaboration with otherspecialized instances and businesses from the local community. A caringenvironment will therefore drive away all sorts of verbal or physicalviolence by pupils or teachers. Such an environment will also bear inmind the particular needs of some teachers: young people who are justbeginning, older people with burnout problems, etc.The schools involved in the learning communities should put inplace personalized structures to cope with violence at school in itsdiversity of forms. This will require particular attention to do somethingabout every form of violence which is explicitly made unacceptable inthe pedagogical project. To this effect it is recommended to developwithin each school an action plan to tackle violence at school such asthe one proposed by the CONNECT 25 project fi 006 which hasdeveloped a Comprehensive mental health promotion approach 26 . Sixmajor projects were funded under the CONNECT initiative in the fieldof violence in schools 27 . This will be translated into the school regulation25Commission of the European Communities ; the CONNECT INITIATIVE (1991-2001): http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/connect/selection.html26Finnish Centre for Health promotion; Proposal for an action plan to tackle violenceat school in Europe: Comprehensive Mental Health Promotion approach:http://www.health.fi/connect; co-ordinator Ulla Salomäki.27Next to the one mentioned in the footnote above the following projects onviolence have been or are still operational; they were all funded under the CONNECTinitiative:—Country reports on tackling violence in schools:http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk./connect and http://www.gold.ac.uk/tmr—European Observatory of School Violence: http://www.obsviolence.pratique.fr—MUS-E: Music to tackle violence in schools (Yehudi Menuhin Foundation):http://www.menuhin-foundation.com—Novas Res: NO Violenza A Scuola: http://www.comune.torino.it/connect—Universidad Aberta de Portugal: GESPOSIT (social mediators to tackle violence), noweb site; co-ordinator: dr. Lydia Grave.