Report on SHARMED activities

SHARMED (Shared Memories and Dialogues) Erasmus+ project is based on research involving 48 primary school classes in England, Germany and Italy. It was funded by the EU's Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). The research outcome and report underpin the development of school based training and a large online resource MOOC.
The part of research, which is presented in this report, concerns the facilitation of classroom activities in 48 classes in three countries, which was at the core of the SHARMED project. Firstly, about half of the hours of activities spent in the classrooms were video-recorded, and the video-recordings were transcribed. Parts 2 and 3 of this report regard video-recorded activities and include a large number of transcriptions as examples to understand the meaning of the project and the ways in which it was implemented. Part 3, in particular, includes the analysis of facilitation.
Secondly, the comparison between a pre and a post-test questionnaire, administered in the 48 classes and in other classes as a control group, was used to try to understand some effects of the activities. There are some important limitations regarding the use of this questionnaire, which will be explained in Part 4, where the results of this part of research will be explained.
Thirdly, a second part of the post-test questionnaire was used to collect the children’s assessment of the activities. Moreover, to add quality to the analysis, we also conducted focus groups in all the classes in which the activities were implemented. The analysis of the questionnaire of assessment and the results of the focus groups is presented in Part 5.
The connections between Part 3, regarding facilitation, and Parts 4 and 5, regarding effects and assessment of facilitation is far from being perfect. On the one hand, only about half activities were video-recorded, while questionnaires and focus groups regard all the activities. On the other hand, the limitations of Part 4 are relevant. Nevertheless, some interesting connections will be highlighted.
Part 6 includes the audio-recorded interviews administered to 40 teachers who took part in the project, as members of the teaching staff in charge of the classes selected or the project. Almost all these teachers accepted from the beginning to participate. Some of them replaced colleagues who changed schools, as the turnover is rather high in the world of school. These interviewed teachers were able to follow the activities, therefore they were also able to asses them.
The theoretical bases of this report, in particular of the analysis of Parts 2 and 3, are composed of five conceptual dimensions: (a) narratives; (2) facilitation; (c) meaning of using photography; (d) meaning of memory, related to narratives and photography; (e) relevance of intercultural communication and cultural identity. These dimensions will be synthetically introduced below, in order to make understandable the analysis of the following chapters of the report.