From October 10th to 14th, 2022, the Board of Education Styria, another Austrian partner in the HAND:ET-project, invited various representatives from the fields of mental health and education from France, the Czech Republic, Poland and the Netherlands to a working meeting in Graz, Austria.
The meeting addressed the issues of the impact of the COVID 19-pandemic on young people's mental health and the search for appropriate responses from education representatives and authorities. Workshops and panel discussions with Austrian professionals from educational institutions, politics and science took place. Various topic-related national and international projects were also presented.
On behalf of the HAND-ET project, Lisa Paleczek from the University of Graz, presented an overview on the project, especially focusing on the goals, the core concepts and the design of the accompanying research. Additionally, she reported on the implementation of the HAND:ET-system in the five consortium countries Slovenia, Croatia, Sweden, Portugal and Austria, that had just started two months earlier in August, 2022. Country-specific differences were highlighted and the implementation process in Austria was described in detail.
The audience was very interested and after the presentation, there was a lively discussion about the project and the importance for teachers to have the opportunity to train their social-emotional competences and their diversity awareness in a profound training, as HAND:ET provides.
