Sharing Our Languages Makes Amazing Teams in Europe Sustainable Erasmus Project

Project Title

Sharing Our Languages Makes Amazing Teams in Europe Sustainable

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: Cultural heritage/European Year of Cultural Heritage; Teaching and learning of foreign languages; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

The SOULMATES (Sharing Our Languages Makes Amazing Teams in Europe Sustainable) project is a direct response to sharing with our students an intercultural experience whereby they are completely exposed to and given the opportunity to truly enjoy learning a language, with life-long benefits. Both of the partnership schools work with a number of disadvantaged students from a lower socio-economic background. Thus are not given many opportunities to travel or experience another culture and language outside of the classroom walls. The relationship between the two partnership schools has been long-established, having a lot of success with previous ERASMUS+ projects as well as having worked together on the former Comenius projects. Students will be encouraged to become active citizens through the use of critical thinking skills and understanding of other cultures, languages and cultural heritage. Students will be able to explain what cultural heritage is within the context of their own country and also within a European context.

Throughout the life of the project, we aim to encourage students within their language learning journey. In the current climate, language learning within the UK is quickly declining at GCSE and A-Level standards and this is something we would like to tackle. We believe that this project and collaboration with a partnership school is a key tool in being able to fulfill this. Primarily, we aim to foster intercultural dialogue between two different schools in two different countries. Students will become much more aware of themselves, their own cultural identity and how this can fits into their identity within Europe as well. We would like to promote social inclusion between students in Spain and England allowing for strengthened relationships between students which are continuously developing. With this project, we aim to bring the British culture and the Spanish culture closer to the students regardless of their socio-economic background. The results will be noticed in a much more tolerant attitude to others, a stronger linguistic capacity and an enriched knowledge and understanding of a new culture.

Each of the partnership schools will select ten students from the one class group of approximately 20-25 students with whom they will work for the life of the project. This will make it easier for the schools to manage, particularly with regards to timetabling and the overall preparation of activities. The participants will be monitored in the completion of activities by the school staff enlisted in the project. They will be able to call upon one another for support, ideas and advice on what they are aiming to achieve for their activities as well as the persons running the project. Having the ability to work as a whole group once every week or every fortnight is ideal as it allows the lead from each of the partnership schools to monitor exactly what students are doing, how they are doing their research whilst offering individual guidance as and when necessary on how best to complete the activities. In this way the students selected to take part in the LTTAs will be representatives and ambassadors of the work completed by them and by their classmates. The selection process of the participants will be transparent. We aim to select students who have demonstrated a keen interest consistently in the topics covered, who are hard-working students and who would not otherwise be able to travel and participate without the funding of this European project. It will also be important to include students who will be able to host, too; and who have the needed sociolinguistic skills to take part in a mobility successfully.

Students will be expected to create and maintain a folder of their work, including all the activities completed during the life of SOULMATES. As the project comes to an end, students will be asked to complete an evaluation of the project and the process they have gone through on Twinspace. The responses provided in their evaluation, along with the work produced in the activities and video diary reflections, will be used when writing the reports. The report will be conclusive with a wide range of evidence taken from the project to show how its objectives have actually been met. The results will be reflected in the students having a much more tolerant attitude towards others, a stronger linguistic capacity and an enriched knowledge, understanding and love for a new culture from all of the participants. They will have found their “SOULMATES”.

SOULMATES will be a platform whereby students will become much more conscious citizens of the world. Upon completion of the project, the partners of this will continue to collaborate through the eTwinning platform, via email and Facebook to prepare future projects and to share the good practice of teaching methods which we hope to benefit from thanks to this project.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 13077,6 Eur

Project Coordinator

Archbishop Ilsley Catholic School & Country: UK

Project Partners

• IES Ramon y Cajal