Teaching in Europe: Freshwater Crisis Erasmus Project

Project Title

Teaching in Europe: Freshwater Crisis

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 : Strategic Partnerships for Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Pedagogy and didactics; Environment and climate change; Creativity and culture

Project Summary

Competences support learning and problem solving. They make people more capable of acting and enable them for independent learning.

The number of pupils who have difficulties in understanding texts and expressing their point of view and who are therefore less successful at school increases. Some of them get frustrated and leave school education earlier than necessary.

Language competence is the precondition for acquiring knowledge and media competence. It develops the abilities to articulate and share ideas, to communicate, to reflect and connect old and new knowledge. It is the foundation for acquiring more competences and for seizing opportunities. Language competence is a forceful communication tool and supports intercultural competences.

We are worried that it gets more and more difficult for our pupils to make their own experiences and to be creative. Creative competence is important in our increasingly versatile world. Being able to perceive the world in new ways, to make new connections and generate solutions helps build your own experiences, develop as an independently minded and autonomous person who does not just adopt and use other’s patterns of thought and action.

We need more ideas how we can help our pupils to improve these competences. That’s why we – teachers from different schools and countries – started this project to get more insight how teaching competences is done at other schools and to gain new ideas how to approach the current deficits.

But just acquiring competences is not enough to make qualified decisions and to assess actions. That is why we have also worked gaining science knowledge while improving the competences. Our pupils knew that we have a problem with global warming, but they did not know that the increasing shortage of freshwater worldwide will become an even bigger problem – not only for our environment but also for our society and the manhood as a whole. That is why we want our pupils to know more about the topic of freshwater, understand its value and treat water mindfully.

Six schools have been working jointly in this project and again they enjoyed their collaboration very much.
Coordinating school was Stadtteilschule Arheilgen (Darmstadt/Germany), a cooperative comprehensive for age 10-16. Zakladni skola T.G. Masaryka (Blansko/Czech Republic) provides elementary education for age 6-15, Language School Drita (Sofia/Bulgaria) offers primary and secondary education for age 7-18, Scoala Primara ‘Hänsel und Gretel’ (Iasi/Romania) is a preschool for age 3-6 and a primary for age 6-11, Vali Sabahattin Cakmakoglu Ortaokulu (Mersin/Turkey) is a secondary for age 11-15, Rotebergs skola (Edsbyn/Sweden) is a primary for age 6 to 12 and has a preschool class.

The schools vary in size, their location within Europe and the number of pupils from families of different cultural and social background and economic status. Their catchment areas differ from a more rural environment to large cities. They are located in different types of landscape, climate zones and cultural environments.
In order to improve our pupils’ competences, their knowledge about freshwater, to make them responsible in acting and thinking in a transnational frame, we elaborated activities dealing with words, proverbs & pieces of wisdom related to water, water footprints & contaminating freshwater, freshwater biotopes & rivers being lifelines, water cycles, reports about life in water stressed areas, legends & fairy tales, forces of water, virtual water and more.

Our pupils prepared exhibitions, guidelines & presentations, made drawings & created picture stories, world maps & games, made awareness raising actions & competitions, developed own views & exchanged & reflected them, explained complicated correlations by visualisation, explained how things work and more.

Their teachers developed a concept for project classes where pupils of our partner schools worked together on project related issues for one week. They got insight into life at school & of families & into leisure-time behaviour of peers in other countries.

Our final guide called “Teaching in Europe: Freshwater Crisis – Guide for Kindergarten and School Teachers” holds all reports about the activities and more information in English and is available for downloading on www.freshwatercrisisproject.eu and on www.sts-arheilgen.de/comenius

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 103760 Eur

Project Coordinator

Stadtteilschule Arheilgen & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Scoala Primara Hänsel und Gretel
• Vali Sabahattin Çakmakoglu Ortaokulu
• Private Primary and Secondary Language School DRITA
• Rotebergs skola
• Zakladni skola Tomase Garrigua Masaryka Blansko, Rodkovskeho 2