1984 – Connecting Arts & Technology Erasmus Project

Project Title

1984 – Connecting Arts & Technology

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Creativity and culture

Project Summary

Our concept “1984 – CAT” offers an unprecedented Erasmus Plus project: a musical about arts and technology. The novel “1984” written by George Orwell is a dystopian text about a world in which people have become victims of omnipresent surveillance and propaganda. The two participating schools, Les Carolines and Ernestinum, adapt the novel to the challenges of the digital era to teach our students (aged 13-17, coming from different social and cultural contexts) 21st century competences regarding social media, surveillance and data privacy. The emerging musical at the end will be staged in Valencia (Spain) and Coburg (Germany).
After having organized a meeting in Valencia in November 2018, it came clear that the design of the project allows us to learn from each other by combining our fields of expert: Arts (Les Carolines , Valencia) and Technology (Ernestinum, Coburg).

Les Carolines has a clear arts-based profile: It offers a vast experience specifically in how to organize musicals. It is known for its extraordinary performances, shows and musicals which have been organized for many years. Les Carolines‘ teachers Rafael Santibanez and Sergio Valera gained much experience by preparing musicals with their students. They will accompany the whole project.

Ernestinum has a clear technologoy-based profile: Considering the fact that Gymnasium Ernestinum was admitted to the national network of schools with an excellent education in MINT-studies, called “MINT-EC”, it comes clear that one crucial element of our educational programme is to promote students in this field of learning by offering extra-curricular courses in robotics, electronics and mathematics. Moreover, Ernestinum constantly participates successfully in federal and national competitions (e.g. First Lego League, the Bavarian competition in Maths, Innovation Award of the Schaeffler FAG, etc.). There are teachers and learners alike to pay special attention to Robotics and Electronics.
Combining both capacities offers synergetic effects: it widens the horizons of each school, it trains peer learning, language skills and it strengthens community feeling, team spirit, trust and the European Spirit which will have a long-term effect in our sudents’ work lives.

An important objective for Ernestinum is to acquire new artistic, linguistic and musical skills and to encourage students to get better in robotics while Les Carolines profits from the students of Ernestinum in the area of robotics and electronics. Les Carolines will be able to implement these skills in their robotics curriculum and Ernestinum will be able to enrich their arts curriculum during and after the project. Besides that, it is important to develop a community feeling among students from different nations (here: Germany, Spain). Moreover, it is crucial that students from both schools learn that sharing knowledge, diversity and regional identity (Franconia, Valencia) improve the resulting musical. The fact that students stay and spend their time at host families of their team-mates will deepen that atmosphere of trust.

We plan to include 4 mobilities with activities such as rehearsals, workshops about dancing, performing, language and robotics and working with texts. Working with texts is a first key activity as the text is the foundation of the performance. Organizing workshops helps to exchange skills which will be necessary for the musical. We have to carry out trainings for our students that cover language, technology and acting. Planning rehearsals includes combining the adapted text with the acquired skills in the workshops.

The methodology used is based on Project-Based Learning. Both schools have considerable experience in this field and their staff is demanded as trainers. Other approaches which feed the pedagogic backbone (PBL) are the PLE (Personal Learning Environments) and CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning). Moreover, the project is based on peer learning: German students will teach their Spanish partners how to develop that kind of technology and Spanish students will teach their German peers how dance, act and sing.

As concrete result, both schools plan to stage the musical in Coburg and Valencia. It will be a performance that makes the audience and studens aware of the fact that technology can be used to restrict democratic freedoms which are a core element of the principles that the EU is standing and known for on a global scale. Moreover, worksheets, instruction pages as to built up robotics and theatre classes, blog posts, fotos, videos and workshop results and dissemination materials will be available as good practice examples.

After 2021, the project will not be finished: The long-term benefit both for Ernestinum and Les Carolines is to move ahead in our way of professionalizing robotics classes. Ernestinum wants to widen its experience in terms of theatre and we would like to stage musicals in the future and to learn from the examples of Les Carolines.

Project Website

http://1984-cat.eu/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 21575 Eur

Project Coordinator

Gymnasium Ernestinum & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Escola Les Carolines