HAND IN HAND: Empowering teachers across Europe to deal with social, emotional and diversity related career challenges

HAND IN HAND: Empowering teachers across Europe to deal with social, emotional and diversity related career challenges is a policy experimentation project (under the Erasmus + program, Key Action 3) that brings together 11 partners from six countries. The project focuses on teachers by supporting their development of social and emotional competencies as well as their diversity awareness (SEDA) to empower them for the complexity of everyday working life with increasingly diverse classrooms and enable them to deal flexibly with new challenges. It also puts the teachers’ well-being at the center by highlighting how developing SEDA competencies simultaneously fosters self-care for teachers, giving a central role to the voices of teachers. HAND: Empowering Teachers builds on the lessons learnt and insights from HAND IN HAND: Social and Emotional Skills for Tolerant and Non-discriminative Societies which was recognized as one of the ten most relevant EU projects addressing teachers’ and school leaders’ more attractive career paths.

The HAND: Empowering Teachers project hypothesizes that professional development programme to empower teachers in an innovative holistic model approach (a whole-school-whole-year support system) will lead to improvement of teachers’ SEDA competencies. The HAND: Empowering Teachers will be tested by using a quasi-experimental design with control groups (before-after effects) in five consortium countries (Slovenia, Croatia, Sweden, Austria, Portugal), teachers (primary and lower secondary) being the direct target group.

HAND: Empowering Teachers project aims to contribute to the formation of a comprehensive EU teacher policy (by providing EU and country-specific recommendations), addressing contemporary structural problems of the teaching profession in an evidence-based long-term way.

Within the project, NEPC has the role of coordinator of communication and dissemination, encompassing a set of promotional efforts, events and products to optimize the use of the results and outputs of the project itself as well as the sharing of results to all relevant stakeholders.

The project started in April 2021 and it will last for free year (until April 2024)

Consortium:

Educational Research Institute (ERI) – Slovenia

Ministry of Education, Science, and Sport (MESS) – Slovenia

Ministry of Science and Education (MSE) – Croatia

Bildungsdirektion Steiermark (Board of Education of Styria) – Austria

DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education (DIPF) – Germany

Institute for Social Research in Zagreb (ISRZ) – Croatia

University of Graz (Uni Graz) – Austria

Mid Sweden University (MIUN) – Germany

Universidade de Lisboa (ULisboa) – Portugal

Aarhus University (AU) – Denmark