Gemeenschappelijke Schoolwetgeving Erasmus Project

Project Title

Gemeenschappelijke Schoolwetgeving

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 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Civic engagement / responsible citizenship; Social dialogue

Project Summary

This project aims to significantly increase European citizenship in the Dutch school Metis Montessori Lyceum in Amsterdam and the Belgian Go-Middle School MIRA in Hamme by 2022. We are both UNESCO schools, which attach great importance to global citizenship by focusin on cognitive, socio-emotional and behavioural development. We choose to implement three of the United Nations 17 Sustainable development goals (SDG’s) in and around our schools. We will do this by actively involving the students and by exchanging ideas during the international exchanges. The emphasis will mainly be on the 3 goals: ‘quality education’, ‘peace / security in strong public services’ and ‘partnership to achieve objectives’. We will do this by ourselves, but also within the involved school, students and their environment in the realization of a youth court at both schools.
We want to establish a youth court. A court in which peers act as prosecutors, lawyers and judges for school students who have done something wrong. Case studies of fellow students are defended in the presence of the perpetrators (but also the parents if desired) and assessed by well-prepared and trained students. This will involve cultivating a moral compass, practicing arguments and dealing with perpetrators and victims as best as possible.
The main principle for the handling of a case by the youth court is that the students take responsibility for what he or she has done. Together with his / her parents, the person concerned chooses to have the case submitted to students of the youth court for assessment. Instead of the school management or teacher imposing a measure, the youth court is first given this authority. The aim of this treatment by the youth court is to find a better outcome together with all those directly involved. This will focus on restoring what went wrong. Or: solve instead of (just) punishment. In this way, we look at what is necessary and reasonable to be able to continue working together after the event at school. In this way, the students themselves ensure a safe climate at school in which they take their responsibility.
We will organize preparing classes in both of the countries, where we will talk about the SDG topics. And when we have the exchange, we will go deeper after we have done orientation activities and icebreakers. Als in preparation, our students will be able to work out different scenarios. They can collect input for these cases from their network if desired. In addition to the many philosophizing and debating, the students visit a police station, they attend training with a judge, a lawyer and a public prosecutor. Each with the objective: how can we best achieve peace and security in our mini society? When we compare the outcome of these cases with peers from a neighboring country during the exchanges, it becomes interesting. The students will find out what differences there are between the Netherlands and Belgium. Not only in terms of culture, school system, but also in terms of legal system. Our students will find out that you get to know yourself better by comparing yourself to someone else. We will get the answer from our commonality, we are world citizens, Europeans and we support the European court and the European parliament.

There will also be room for excursions. For example, we have already made contact with bodies such as the Ministries of Justice, the International Court of Justice, the Museum of European History, the Anne Frank House, etc. During the second meeting, cases will be exchanged. In this way it is fine-tuned which problems have occurred in both schools, what the outcome was and whether this was in accordance with the moral compass of the sister school. Six months later we will again agree to transfer to new participants of the youth court and its continuation and expansion.
As you can see, we are working with our school courts towards a more aware, safer and better European citizenship among our students. The project concerns a total group of 30 students, 15 from the Netherlands and 15 from Belgium. At both schools there will be debate about measures and possible consequences for perpetrators. This project should eventually become a permanent part of the curriculum at both schools. We will also involve the school communities and partners in the Netherlands and Belgium in order to increase the publicity of the project. In this way, an increasing number of youth courts are helping to defend a safe school climate and ownership bottom up. Themes such as discrimination, fraud, pollution, theft, physical and verbal violence will be discussed. During the exchanges there will be international debate on these themes. In the end, everything will be laid down in an official European school lawbook that we believe is. The lawbook will be presented by students to the management team of both schools as a product of this project.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 54720 Eur

Project Coordinator

Metis Montessori Lyceum & Country: NL

Project Partners

• GO! middenschool MIRA Hamme