The sustainable city for the European citizen of 2030 – meeting diversity through new approaches in upper secondary education Erasmus Project

Project Title

The sustainable city for the European citizen of 2030 – meeting diversity through new approaches in upper secondary education

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: EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Quality and Relevance of Higher Education in Partner Countries

Project Summary

”The sustainable city for the European citizen of 2030 – meeting diversity through new approaches in upper secondary education”

Some of our six schools have already cooperated in a variety of ways previously. However, our new cooperation puts the schools themselves, rather than the subject matter of the project, far more into focus. By concentrating more than before on the “how” rather than the “what”, we hope to learn not only together but also increasingly from each other.

Preparing for our new project it became apparent that we are facing similar challenges: the student body at all our schools is becoming increasingly diverse. While most schools have successfully dealt with heterogeneous classes in primary and lower secondary education, these challenges have so far been neglected on the upper secondary level.

Each partner school has already some experience with different educational and methodical approaches that they have adopted at their school to meet the challenges of diversity. As the focuses are slightly different at each school, we believe that this is an ideal basis for learning from one another.

The Alsundgymnasium Sonderborg (Denmark) and Nacka Gymnasium (Sweden) have experience with interdisciplinary projects, KTS Flensburg (Germany) is a competence centre for service learning involving classes 8-10, the school INS Montgros, Barcelona (Spain) has also worked with service learning and with cooperative project-oriented methods, Ekpaideftiria ALPHA, Athens (Greece) and Anabilim Anadolu Lisesi in Istanbul (Turkey) can contribute expertise in intercultural learning and how to include students from diverse social backgrounds, including refugees.

Building on this expertise, we envisage a combination of these methodological concepts, their further development and adaption to upper secondary education.

We decided to combine meeting this methodological challenge with the project content of shaping a sustainable living: We will use the Sustainability Goals of the Agenda 2030 as a frame of reference and engage the students in developing their city of 2030 as a sustainable community of people who take responsibility.

Throughout the project, each school will focus on how to improve the situation in their own city. This is to increase the motivation of the students, as the project work will be closely related to their own experiences, their environment and their personal future.
We chose service learning as a key teaching and learning strategy because it puts the emphasis both on students’ learning and on addressing real needs in the community thus making learning meaningful. Service learning also requires interdisciplinary learning as it aims at solving certain social problems which usually cannot be addressed with the knowledge and the methods of only one school subject. Moreover, this method seems suitable for including students with a wide range of skills and multiple intelligences in academic learning processes. While working with service learning, we will use a wide range of collaborative methods and methods that develop the communicative skills of the students . To include students with migrant backgrounds, methods of intercultural learning also need to be explored.

Each school will participate with two regular classes plus voluntary inter-year groups of specially dedicated students. Project activities will comprise project work in the individual schools, bilateral and multilateral collaboration via eTwinning and two transnational meetings per year – a shorter one only for teachers with a focus on methodological development, planning and coordination and a longer teaching and learning conference with a focus on content and first-hand experience.

Our aim is that after the three years of our project internal structures in the participating schools will have changed, service learning projects and interdisciplinary projects will have become an integral part of the school’s educational concept and the range of teaching methods applied to cater for a diverse body of students will have increased considerably. Our cooperation is designed to give teachers practice and confidence in using new teaching methods to ensure that students see their individual needs better taken into account and consider the school’s learning settings suitable to help them develop their full potential.

Like the communities we live in education needs development and constant revision. Communication and openness to ideas from outside are integral parts of our cooperation.

Our interest in the experiences, ideas and observations of our partner schools will help us to better understand our different situations; it will stimulate us to learn from one another and help us to strengthen our intercultural competences, as well as our transcultural understanding. We will discuss our findings and strengthen our awareness of the diversity that is Europe.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 131243 Eur

Project Coordinator

Kurt-Tucholsky-Schule Flensburg & Country: DE

Project Partners

• EKPAIDEFTIRIA ALPHA
• INS MONTGROS
• Alssundgymnasiet Sønderborg
• Nacka gymnasium Natur & Teknik
• Anabilim Anadolu Lisesi