Academic Staff of the Faculty of Education, Psychology and Art hosted the Meeting of Erasmus+ project CREDIBLE – an Initiative to Help Teachers Include Children with Rare Diseases in the Learning Process

On the 7th and 8th of October the academic staff of the University of Latvia (UL), the Faculty of Education, Psychology and art (FEPA) Professor Indra Odiņa and Assistant Professor Evija Latkovska, and an assistant Mustafa Kavak welcomed guests from Spain, Romania and Greece who are partners in the KA2 – Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices KA201 – Strategic Partnerships for school education project CREDIBLE (Children with Rare Diseases and their Inclusion in Basic Learning Environments). Observing the rules of epidemiological safety, the participants of the project worked at the FEPA on the 7th of October and at the House of Nature on the 8th of October. Project partners from Great Britain and Spanish Rare Diseases Federation (FEDER) participated in the project online.

In the workshop of the project, the necessary improvements for the productive operation of the developed interactive platform were updated. The platform is designed to support teachers in their work with children with rare diseases. The organisation responsible for the development of the platform is Softspring – a Spanish company dealing with digital solutions for more than 15 years. The aim of the platform is to offer teachers the opportunity to share their pedagogical observations and examples of good practice in working with children with rare diseases. Moreover, it will be a place where questions can be asked and answers found if educators cannot find solutions on their own.

Another issue dealt with in the seminar was the development of an informative guide for teachers. The aim of the guide is to illustrate pedagogical opportunities for including children with rare diseases in the educational process. It is important to help teachers be aware of those cases when children who suffer from a rare disease can still be included in the educational process. The responsible project member organisations for the development of the guide are the University of Valencia (Spain) and the University of Latvia. Therefore the academic staff of the FEPA Associate Professor Ieva Margeviča-Grinberga and Lecturer Egija Laganovska have been invited to participate in the project as their knowledge, experience and competence can benefit the development of the guide.

Experts from all the project member states and organisations hope that the intellectual outputs of the project will help teachers in their daily work with children with rare diseases and will help them communicate internationally giving a chance to share examples of good practice thus enriching their professional competence.

Project participants also look forward to meeting face-to-face at the University of Valencia in January 2022, when the platform and the guide will be tested in an in-service professional development course for teachers.

Homepage: https://erasmuscredible.eu/
Facebook page: here.