Emotional Wellbeing Erasmus Project

Project Title

Emotional Wellbeing

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; International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

The world is changing rapidly thanks to a range of economic, societal and technological forces. Stability becomes more and more a meaningless word. Young people aren’t sure of what their future will look like. Our educational systems focus mainly on knowledge. We also see a growing societal pressure to reach the highest possible level of education in order to ‘be’ somebody. There is also a growing polarization with an apparent lack of morality. This results for instance in the use of fake news, which makes it sometimes very difficult to know what is real and what isn’t. And now there is also covid-19.
Young people must learn how to deal with factors of stress and insecurity. It’s important that they learn to deal with negative thoughts, with a fear of missing out (fomo), with possibly greater risks of depressions and online addictions. They must learn to be in control of their mobile phones, of their futures, of their own wellbeing. They must learn to be in control of their own lives.

Technological changes result in a digitized world. Young people spend an average of 5 hours per day behind a screen, mainly on social media. The amount of information we receive every single day is huge. Brain research shows that social media trigger the so called reptile brain. They trigger unconscious activities in the brain causing addiction and putting the brain in a constant mode of attack (attention), leaving no room for moments of rest and relaxation. An example are the blue checkmarks in WhatsApp. This could lead to sleeping disorders with all its consequences. (Social) isolation and addiction are lurking. The development of the so called executive functions in the brain are essential.

Our general and main objective is to make students and teachers aware of technological, societal and economical changes in the world and the impact those changes have on their wellbeing, now and in their future. This should lead to a different kind of behaviour regarding the aspects of the changes and to discussions with or between students, parents, teachers and school boards about people’s wellbeing. More concrete we want to enable students to perform a better social interaction, to develop their social skills, the ability to understand, tolerate, and cope with other’s ways of thinking. This should result into higher psychological wellbeing and more self-esteem in order to be able to achieve intended goals.

We aim to have 150 students, in the age of 14 to 16 years, directly participating in the meetings together with their families and with teachers. Beside those participants we want to reach more people via the websites and social media of the participating schools and via the project’s website and social media.

All activities will confront the participants with factors that cause stress or insecurity, now or in the future. Each partner school focussing on a factor which is typical for their situation or background. The added value is in the fact that schools are situated in different parts of Europe. Next to experiencing stress and insecurity we offer the participants tools which can help them to deal with stress.

During and after this project we develop and maintain a website about wellbeing. This website will be filled with theoretical background and timetabled lesson plans about a wide range of emotional wellbeing and tips and activities that can help to deal with stress in a positive way. This website will be open to all who are interested.

Due to covid-19 we haven’t been able to organize the final two meetings in Hungary and the Netherlands. We have discussed the possibility to have online meetings, but decided not to. We couldn’t guarantee the quality of those meetings and we found it hard to motivate our students who were too busy keeping themselves motivated at all.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 114617,96 Eur

Project Coordinator

2College Durendael & Country: NL

Project Partners

• Budapest II. Kerületi Szabó Lörinc Kéttannyelvü Általános Iskola és Gimnázium
• The Whitby High School
• LYCEE DE L’EUROPE
• Vecumnieku vidusskola