IMAGINe-n@ion Erasmus Project

Project Title

IMAGINe-n@ion

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: Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education

Project Summary

Context:
Imagine-n@ion is a 3-year project between 3 schools in 3 countries: Finland, France and Germany. The project has been created to develop learning and teaching processes by taking into account the needs of the modern society and 21st century learning. The needs include abilities to interact in plurilingual, multicultural environments, digitalisation of learning and teaching processes, and new literacies. Furthermore these skills encourage the learner to be an active participant and take initiative and more responsibility in learning. The project will function as an agency lab for students, who are willing to explore new ways of learning and as an inspiration and empowerment tool for the participating teachers.
Background:
The nature of learning has been described in different ways over the years. It is important to renegotiate the nature of learning as well as teaching and evaluate their quality on a continuous base. So far, it has become evident that quality may mean somewhat different issues in different European countries, or that the emphasis of evaluating quality may be directed in different ways. We find it important to co-create common understanding in order to build new, shared conceptions of evaluating quality on a broad European scale.
It is easy to evaluate learning based on learning products, such as written work or tests done by the students. However, if this is the only way to see the role of evaluation, teaching may be understood as a relatively narrow process. It is easy to discuss issues like plurilingualism, multiculturalism digitalisation and new literacies. We want to make these discourses enter the actual practices in school life.
Various types of beliefs, attitudes and prejudices are circulating in our societies, including schools. Some of these beliefs and attitudes can lead to racism or other radical actions. Schools are in an important role in fighting against such actions.
Objectives:
1) Participatory design of the project activities among all partner schools, including both teachers and students. The participatory approach will give all the participants (also students) possibilities to take part in the design of the project activities and their evaluation, thus, guide them towards more active citizenship. We will encourage more experienced students to guide younger students in certain activities, e.g., in solving mathematical problems, giving support in linguistic problems (e.g., pronunciation).
2) Innovative learning activities will be designed to meet the needs of each school and combined into meaningful entities to provide support to learners on different levels. The aim is to help the students to realise their own strengths in the learning process and to support the development of their learner agency. Innovative learning activities include the idea of trying something new in teaching and learning, this idea will be elaborated by versatile use of technology enabling the sharing of activities in situ.
3) Sustainable “best” practices during the project will be looked for in order to develop such teaching and learning practices, which would be meaningful for all participants and easily rearranged in the future.
Participants: Altogether about 100 participants will be actively working within the project. A special focus group are skilled students from lower economic backgrounds. Nevertheless, all members of the 3 school communities will share some activities of the project.
We will organise at least once a year an event in each school on 9th May in order to present and raise awareness among our students and staff about Europe. We also want to offer some teachers who are not involved in the project to participate to International meeting in order to give them the opportunity to discover and to work with foreign colleagues.
Activities: Online activities and research on specific topics, presentations, webinars and online conferences, creating of films, newspapers and plays.
Methodology: Collaborative learning and teaching.
Impact:
The experiences gained in the project will be beneficial for the development work in all the participating schools. The activities are designed to support learning in various ways, thus, the students will learn skills which are not usually part of their every-day education. Moreover, the students will discover the daily life in another country, they will be hosted in students’ families. The project will offer empowerment to teachers in forms of peer support. The activities designed for the project can be re-utilised and developed further, and they can function as examples in pre- and in-service teacher education.

Longer term benefits:
As mentioned above, the project introduces innovating teaching activities, which may be beneficial at various levels on teacher education. We are also aiming at creating sustainability to our own schools’ work in terms of international cooperation.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 90190 Eur

Project Coordinator

ORGANISATION DE GESTION DES ECOLES CATHOLIQUES DE BOURGOIN JALLIEU & Country: FR

Project Partners

• Myllytullin koulu, Oulun kaupunki
• Anne Frank Gymnasium