Schools Across Borders aims to empower students in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine to engage in reflection, understanding and communication on the following themes:

• conflict realities and issues, primarily experienced and expressed by Israeli and Palestinian secondary school students, and by comparison and contrast, those experienced and expressed by secondary school students in Northern Ireland;
• the themes of local and global interdependence, in terms of a) our developing identities and roles, and b) universal values and rights

Accepting the fact that there is no contact between Israeli and Palestinian schools nor any integrated school programmes between Israeli and Palestinian schools respectively and schools in a third country, our project provides for twin-track programmes that allow space for objective reflection and real student-led action.

Our student-centred programme is adapted to selected secondary school curricula. It provides for direct exchanges of student-produced project material and encounters between secondary schools in the Republic of Ireland/Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine.

Similarly, this curriculum-based project offers potential for developing and furthering exchanges between the participant schools within Northern Ireland and/or joint exchanges between the same participant schools in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

Awareness and Action

Schools Across Borders is a student-centred and action-based development education project. The project objectives are intended to serve and enhance selected subjects in the following ways:

• awareness of different perspectives in the portrayal of conflict and of different daily realities experienced by young people in areas of conflict;
• awareness of the real and potential opportunities open to youth in interpreting conflict according to their own common rights, responsibilities and values;
• awareness of universal interdependence, in terms of our developing identities: personal; social; communal and national
• a common will to communicate directly in ways that will consolidate and advance the universal precepts of the project.