Discrimination and Racism incidents in grassroots sports is a new scourge that must be urgently addressed with effective and creative ways.
The effects of discrimination and racism are equally negative and unpleasant as in any community of people where each one is different but respect a common purpose that a group or community follows. For this reason, information and active participation is an important step towards extinction, address and resolve such issues as violence incidents in sports.
IRIS GOALS
IRIS aims to inform coaches and PE teachers on identifying underlying problems of discrimination, racism and violence, train them on novel didactic approaches for preventing these phenomena and provide them with educational tools for applying and integrating these approaches in everyday school sports activities.
It is not rare to witness incidents of racism and discrimination in the professional sports world, a phenomenon that encourages intolerance and sometimes even violence and hooliganism.
Since sports are an integral part of our society today, the impact of such incidents may be huge for our societies and especially for young children, which have professional athletes as role models. The proposed project focuses on school-level grassroots sports and the involved coaches and physical education (PE) teachers as education practitioners and multiplying factors.
IRIS OBJECTIVES
The challenges that the project is required to face can be summarized to the following points:
- Identification and recording of the training needs of the PE teachers and coaches regarding early recognition of racism and intolerance in sport, despite their different formal educational background and informal knowledge.
- Documentation at European level of the educational methods that can be used during the course of PE or in classroom by the PE teachers, as well as the supporting educational tools that will be used to students and athletes
- Development of an innovative educational program based on the diagnosed needs of the PE teachers and coaches, which will also be rendered by a set of appropriate educational tools for supporting more rare and difficult behaviors of students/ young athletes.
- Design and development of a distance learning platform, through which asynchronous and synchronous education will be provided via multimedia educational content, available to all interested PE teachers and coaches.
- The actual training of PE teachers and coaches and pilot implementation of the developed educational methods and tools in schools and sports clubs, in order to demonstrate tangible results.
- The demonstration of the distance learning platform in order to attract numerous learners during the project and training content providers after the end of the project, so as to ensure the viability and use of the system over time.
IRIS-TARGET GROUPS
- Physical Education (PE) Teachers and Coaches
- Athletes
- Leaders of sport teams
- Sport Bodies and Communities
- Regional and Local Sports authorities