The P.IN.O.K.I.O Project  
The project “P.IN.O.K.I.O.- Pupils for INnOvation as a Key to Intercultural and social inclusion” is a Comenius Multilateral project that aims at promoting intercultural dialogue against social exclusion. The project peculiar innovation is the integration of literature or children’s stories from different cultures, school environment and curriculum, the pupils’ family background, arts and creativity, and web 2.0 tools.
Its proposal is also focused on the development of some of the eight key-competences recommended by the EC as “those which all individuals need for personal fulfillment and development, active citizenship, social inclusion and employment” (Rec.2006/962/EC). The key-competences addressed in this project are: 1. Communication in the mother tongue; 2. Learning to learn; 3. Social and civic competences; 4. Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship; 5. Cultural awareness and expression.

The project is conceived to be implemented in a nursery or primary school environment.

The main focuses if the PINOKIO project are:

• promote pupils’ multicultural and intercultural competence by interacting with narratives;
• promote children’s stories as an instrument of multicultural dialogue that aims to foster intercultural competences and social inclusion;
• improve and develop transversal Key Competences in children, towards the promotion of intercultural dialogue and social inclusion;
• provide pre-school and primary school teachers with the necessary skills so that they can face the development of the key-competences in children;
• think, create, edit and disseminate didactic materials bearing in mind the promotion of multicultural skills as well as of intercultural attitudes, and promote social inclusion;
• foster school-family interaction (with particular regard to migrant families) via shared narratives;
• implement knowledge and awareness of web 2.0 tools as suitable instruments to reach the project goals, as they are consistent with the intercultural dialogue attitude that must underpin the whole project.

P.IN.O.K.I.O. main innovation lies in the integration of literature (in a wider meaning as the whole of the narratives that belong to a given culture or are shared by more than one culture) with art and creativity, web 2.0 tools, school life and school curricula, pupils’ families interaction with school environments, in order to foster intercultural attitudes in pupils, as well as in teachers and families.
The project implementation involved scores of schools and school teachers, hundreds of pupils, as well as many pupils’ migrant or non migrant families, and experts in different issues that cooperated with the schools. More details on the project facts and figures can be found at the section [LINK to the section that will host the School Data table: Italian schools, Portuguese schools, Swiss schools, UK schools]

This website is the common tool for all the institutions that took part in P.IN.O.K.I.O. as well as for all those involved or interested in it.

In its public part, it serves to:
-    inform on:
-    the project general features, who are the project partners, their general activities, their tasks and achievements (see Description of the project [Link]);
- the European activities the project is involved in, or that concern issues the project includes in its framework (see PINOKIO Project News);
the general outline of the project activities (see Activities: Work Plan, Training of trainers, Teacher training, Creativity Labs, Intercultural Workshops)
- who are the schools that took part in the project by testing the P.IN.O.K.I.O. activities during a whole school year (see Participants: Italian schools, Portuguese schools, Swiss schools, UK schools);
-    the outcomes of the project (see Achievements)
-    document the project making and daily achievements of its activities and experimentations (see Newsletters, Blog, Facebook);

In its limited access area - which is a Moodle-based Educational Environment - it serves to:
-    share project documents among partners, in a work-in-progress mode
-    lead some teachers’ training activities in FAD mode.

Web Project Manager: Ph.D Alida Favaretto