Culture and History without Borders: Success in Diversity, Diversity in Success Erasmus Project

Project Title

Culture and History without Borders: Success in Diversity, Diversity in Success

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 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Teaching and learning of foreign languages; Creativity and culture; Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning

Project Summary

The project was created as a result of the former cooperation among our five schools – mostly as an eTwinning “follow-up activity”:
• Kunst hat keine Grenzen (a common project of Gimnazjum w Zespole, Mielżyn and TSSYAL Antakya, 2013/14)
• Cultural heritage of my country (a common project of Základní škola Přimda and ICS San Tommaso d’Aquino, 2014/15)
• Kunst ohne Grenzen (a common project of Základní škola Přimda, Gimnazjum w Zespole, Mielżyn and TSSYAL Antakya, 2014/15)
The only one non-eTwinning project was the project called Bookmark which was realized between Základní škola Přimda and Základná škola s materskou školou Zubrohlava. It is a Czech-Slovak cultural project which is organized by Národní pedagogické museum a knihovna J. A. Komenského in Prague and Slovenská pedagogická knižnica in Bratislava.
The topics of all these projects were always culture and history, so we decided to realize a common project focused on the culture and history of our countries.
The aim of the project was to make our pupils familiar with the culture and history of our countries. They were allowed to learn more about the history and culture of their own countries through the so called cultural-historical workshops which were organized in the particular partner schools. Each school promised to organize at least 12 cultural-historical workshops. The content of the workshops was different, but it was always connected with the culture and history of the country. Our pupils created decorations for different festivals (Christmas, Easter,…), learnt about old traditions, learnt dances, songs, tried out different old arts (marbling, mosaics,…), cooked traditional recipes, learnt about the history of their region thanks to different excursions.
They introduced their new knowledge to their friends from partner countries during the international learning activities and through the presentations, videos and tasks in our TwinSpace. Pupils and teachers from all our countries learnt lots of information about their partners’ countries and they learnt more about the culture and history of their own country. They could compare, what we have similar and what is different. We organized 5 international learning activities, where 121 pupils and 40 teachers participated.
Five schools participated in this project: 3 primary schools (from the Czech Republic, Italy and Slovakia) and two secondary schools (from Poland and Turkey). Pupils who worked on the project were 11 – 15 years old.
The main output of our project was our project chronicle which consists of the project diary, international cookbook and international songbook, book of the legends and a dictionary of the basic phrases in seven languages. Each partner was responsible for one part of the chronicle: Czech group for the project diary, Italian group for the cookbook, Slovak group for the songbook, Turkish group for the book of legends and the Polish group for the multilingual dictionary. The other outputs of our project are presentations and videos from the particular workshops and international learning activities. Pupils who participated in the project improved their language skills (we used English and German for the communication during the project and this is the reason why we used both the languages in our final output – the project chronicle). They improved their digital skills too because we used ICT for our project work. One of the most important things is that they learnt how to cooperate in an international team – they improved their social, personal and learning competences, competences for work and for problems’ solution. The most important output of our project is probably that it was able to break down the barriers and prejudice among our nations and cultures which is really very important in nowadays world. The project didn’t touch only our schools, it influenced the life in our local communities too (especially during the international learning activities and international project meetings). It increased not only the prestige of our schools, but the prestige of our villages, towns and cities too.
Our project has changed the attitude of the participating pupils to their peers from other countries; it broke down the prejudice and barriers. It helped the pupils to be more self-contained and self-confident. We created new friendships during the project and our cooperation didn’t end at the end of the project. Some of the partners have started new projects under the programme Erasmus+ or under eTwinning.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 151610 Eur

Project Coordinator

Zakladni skola Primda, okres Tachov, prispevkova organizace & Country: CZ

Project Partners

• Zakladna skola s materskou skolou Zubrohlava
• Istituto Comprensivo San Tommaso d’Aquino
• Gimnazjum w Zespole
• TOKI Sehit Suleyman Yilmaz Anadolu Lisesi