Fit for your Future – Fit for Europe Erasmus Project

Project Title

Fit for your Future – Fit for Europe

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: Health and wellbeing; Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning; Early School Leaving / combating failure in education

Project Summary

‘Fit for your Future – Fit for Europe’

For children and teenagers today, it is of utmost importance to grow up in a healthy and health-conscious way to thrive and prosper in order to finally tackle society’s challenges lying ahead of them. Frequent physical exercise as well as a varied and diversified diet are the essential prerequisites for a development like that. This, however, is far from reality in present-day Europe: An increasingly unhealthy diet and the lack of exercise among young people lead to a passive and less performance-oriented attitude in teenagers today negatively affecting the quality of school education as the precondition for an active and self-dependent shaping of one’s own professional future. The spreading corona pandemic that lead to a far-ranging lockdown not only of schools, but also of sports centres and clubs worsened the situation even further: It deprived the teenagers of the possibility of frequent physical exercise in a social environment.

Our project ‘Fit for your Future- Fit for Europe’ tried and with its created (teaching) resources still tries to tackle the high drop out rate (esp. in Germany) as well as the increasing unemployment of young people (esp. in ltaly) and addresses the growing demand for highly skilled manpower in Europe. On the one hand, our project particularly
aimed at supporting the students’ learning initiative, motivation and resilience; on the other hand, it focused on personal responsibility and on becoming aware of one’s own skills and abilities to foster lifelong learning and improve future vocational training prospects of our students on a pan-European basis.

25 students and five teachers participated in our project which stretched over a period of 30 months altogether (including an extension due to the corona pandemic). In small international groups, the participants investigated numerous aspects of physical exercise,
health and nutrition and the reasons for social and cultural differences including their impact on the overall enhancement of individual performance. To that end, each country first focused on one of the project’s main topics according to the schools’ different fields of expertise – Germany: physical exercise and health; Italy: nutrition and therapy – before results, experience and created products were shared, debated and evaluated and finally turned into various teaching resources for subjects such as Physical Education, Life Science or Efficient Learning Support. The project’s results will eventually be included into innovative lesson plans, into our schools’ educational programs on the topic ‘Fit for your Future – Fit for Europe’ as well as into according concepts that will enrich school life not only at the partaking schools, but at all interested schools as well which will contribute to the sustainability and distribution of the project’s outcome.

Based on predominantly practical experience in addition to the theoretical basics, the students learned about the crucial interrelation between physical health and mental mobility and developed educational films, games, practical exercises, educational concepts and lesson units to address and support fellow students – in the course of as well as after the project – in both a sustainable and effective way. Furthermore, the students visited topic-related events, teaching institutions, companies and produced portfolios and presentations. Teachers experienced in the different areas relevant for our project offered help whenever necessary; more professional help, support and workshops were offered by our associated partners, e.g. the College of Physical Education Cologne, School of Hotel Management and Gastronomy in Abano, in the fields of media technology, evaluation, training and nutrition. Due to the corona pandemic, however, changes in the choice of partners and applied methods had to be made and many of the activities had to take place in a digital way.

The personal and digital cooperation with their European partners in small groups gradually contributed to an enhancement of the students’ mutual cultural appreciation and understanding throughout the whole project. In addition, the communication via various types of ICT and the experience made during international school visits helped further the intellectual, linguistic, and ICT competence of the students. Different ICT skills were practiced for communication, documentation, presentation, evaluation and media design. All of these competences are highly desirable in today’s and particularly in a future European working environment.

In this way, our project ‘Fit for your Future – Fit for Europe’ contributed and will contribute to “making lifelong learning and mobility a reality” and establish “conditions for a smart, sustainable and inclusive growth”, thus meeting key objectives of the European Union’s ET 2020 and Europe 2020 strategies.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 39935 Eur

Project Coordinator

Gymnasium Rheinkamp Europaschule Moers & Country: DE

Project Partners

• ISTITUTO DI ISTRUZIONE SUPERIORE LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI