TRAIN in Vienna with BEES

Category: Austria | Local Activities | TRAIN

Step 1

  • Introducing Erasmus+, TRAIN, and BEES

Step 2

  • safe-space introduction, going through the plan for activities, and inviting participants to feel free to co-coordinate workshop with us
  • Everyone in the group introduced themselves shortly by saying their names, age, where they come from…

Step 3

  • Sharing experiences and sharing food
  • Participants shared different experiences they had growing up and living in Austria. While not shying away from sharing faults of our society, need to define integration emerged.

Migration and integration are both not considered to be value-free words, because they have a negative building block.

Participants concluded that migration points to a continuing movement and that integration is most often thought of as a part of immigration

Step 4

  • Coming up with strategies for better integration
  • Participants agreed that initiatives such as this project are very positive, and are a good start; but that they attract people who are already opened to discuss integration and are open-minded when it comes to meeting people from different societal backgrounds.
  • The sensitivity to this issue must also be discussed in politics more than in grass-root debates, so that the seriousness in public gain more value. Newspaper articles with suggestions on how to do this are more important than just describing the problem. Many do not know how to close this gap of integration, instead they are notified with statistics or information about the current state of affairs.
  • The schools in which a large proportion of children with a migrant background are visited, teachers are often overwhelmed with the different cultures and mentality of the students, they usually get through the education to cope. In order to achieve successful integration at a young age, this would require the promotion of classes and students in the schools concerned.
  • In the various federal states, the participants find that the interaction of different cultures and integration is successful. However, at this point there was a difference of participants. The second part misrepresents the opinion that the lack of space in Vienna and the various nationalities mean that citizens are more open to a different culture and interaction because living together can be successful.