EUROPIA – Building New European Dreams Erasmus Project

Project Title

EUROPIA – Building New European Dreams

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 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Cultural heritage/European Year of Cultural Heritage; Creativity and culture

Project Summary

The project group believes that a new, more democratic European cultural heritage is born, based on the hope that a better future is always within reach, but it is one that requires the courage to cooperate and take initiative. The European Year of cultural heritage is a one and only chance to make our students become aware of the importance of our rich cultural past. Some partner schools wish to foster social cohesion with this project, others focus more on critical thinking and engagement, but our common motivation is to prepare our students to become global citizens, to become inclusive rather than exclusive communities.

The project group consists of six schools which were chosen on the basis of their heterogeneity concerning geographical location, but also in terms of student population (students from all social backgrounds). The coordinating school is located in Germany, the partners are from Greece, Portugal, Romania, France and Italy. The students taking part in the project are 15 to 18 years old, come from different school types and work on the activities in different settings. The teachers working with them represent a large variety of subject areas and competences. The head teams of the involved schools monitor the progression of the project and ensure communication to other members of the school community. Each school also associates experts from outside the school to the project.

During the project, selected students and teachers of all participating school visits the other, totaling to six mobilities throughout the 24 months, each including 5 students and 2 accompanying teachers. These mobilities follow the theme of “a journey to EUROPIA” and consist of a mixture of workshops and excursions. Where possible, students will stay with host families from the partner schools, allowing them a deeper immersion into the other cultures.
Aside from these mobilities, the participants concentrate on their cultural heritage in the first year, and then deal with EUROPIA’s future in the second year. In the first year, participants conduct interviews in their home towns under the guiding mottoes of “Europe and me”, “My European Dream”, which will be combined to create a documentary with subtitles in all of the languages of the partners. Moreover, an artistic approach to this theme is taken when, based on Caspar David Friedrich’s painting “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog”, the participants include both cultural heritage and dreams of EUROPIA in one painting. Both of these results function as a foundation of a play written cooperatively and performed on the same night in all partner schools (as a “live conference”), representing the main idea of the European Union, the union within its diversity.

The second year is resolutely turned towards the future: In a cooperative writing project, students from all partner schools write their common “EUROPIA”, a utopia based on the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals by the UN. The writing process will be conducted with the help of “storybird”, a publishing platform for visual storytelling. Before getting together in international writing teams and cooperatively telling “the story of our ideal state: EUROPIA”, each partner school is going to work on two to three SDGs on their own. The exact form of the in-depth work which will be undertaken, can be chosen by each group, but needs to ensure that the involved students are experts in the field they chose and are well prepared to present the main aspects in detail. This is required for the further step in which students concentrate on their work on their EUROPIA. The priorities in terms of the SDGs that the schools/groups chose can be connected to various ideas, e.g. the extension of the school garden, the partnership with a local aid group, the organisation of a jumble sale on a large scale.

The results which are created throughout the project are continually shared, not only among the participants, but also in the whole schools and local communities. The results are visualized in an Erasmus+ corner in each of the participating schools and there are different special events for the project which address a larger public, including media representatives and politicians. Moreover, the project results are enrolled in local competitions.

We believe that by sparking the intercultural dialogue between our students from very different cultural and socio-economic background, our project hopefully enables them to see the surplus of the European cultural heritage for their own life and future. Moreover, the project prepares our students to the requirements of the present and the future by choosing the UN sustainable development goals as the basis for our work.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 104049,9 Eur

Project Coordinator

Marion Dönhoff Gymnasium & Country: DE

Project Partners

• LYCÉE POLYVALENT GABRIEL TOUCHARD-GEORGE WASHINGTON
• COLEGIUL NATIONAL SAMUIL VULCAN BEIUS
• 2nd Highschool of Agios Nikolaos
• AGRUPAMENTO DE ESCOLAS PINHEIRO E ROSA
• Istituto professionale di Stato per i servizi alberghieri e della ristorazione PAOLO BORSELLINO