A contemporary look to 20th century Europe Erasmus Project

Project Title

A contemporary look to 20th century 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 : Strategic Partnerships for Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Teaching and learning of foreign languages; Creativity and culture

Project Summary

All the European educational systems include long courses about their national history in their curricula. Knowing about our past isessential for anybody’s proper education, just as it is the satisfying acquisition of basic skills and the necessary learning of foreign languages as the basis of international communication with our European partners. This project focuses on learning history through a cross-curricular point of view, where the basic skills and foreign languages play a decisive role and students become the main characters in the learning process. The global world our teenagers live in makes them the object of their training process and newmethodologies are needed to promote this.Our project intends students to learn history through the everyday images of the 20th century inherited from their ancestors. Onone hand, these pictures will provide us with the little details of the common people’s workaday, which have been excluded from history books and which can help us get the big picture of what happened in Europe at the time. On the other hand, this local and national point of view is going to give way to recreating a united European history where common people and their lives are going to be the real protagonists. By doing this, a European perspective, which we think is missing form today’s educational system, can be reached. Once both these educational goals are achieved, students should be able to share their experience with other students just like them, with similar backgrounds and common interests. As a result of this process, students have to become their own leaders and reproduce these everyday scenes using their own cameras. This is the only way they will be able to compare their lives to the ones their ancestors lived. Not only will they analyze their countrymen’s lives, but also the lives of other European inhabitants experiencing a similar reality. Furthermore, this new teenager look is going to be crucial in the learning process because it is going to be used to analyse, contrast and study the historical and cultural legacy European countries all share. This is why the basic group is composed by six schools from six countries which have been considered as they provide a diversity of features: Germany, Cyprus, Lithuania and Spain. All of the four schools have formerly participated in the old Comenius projects and they are vastly experienced in the field of international exchanges. In all ofthem, the departments of Social Science and History aim at the idea of beginning new pedagogical experiences which may bring animportant and powerful educational methodology for the students.The educational communities have from 500 to 1000 students each, all of them potential receptors and initial assessors of this work.Transnational meetings are going to be organised where, not only are they going to get to know first hand the local historical legacy,but also will they share and present their insights and the historical collection of visual and written documents by participating indebates and assessing the progress of the project.All of this is going to contribute with basically three products which will prove to be very useful in the long term, both for theeducational interest as well as the cultural impact. In the first place, all the photographic material will belong in a unique databasewhich will have an open licence to be used by public in general. Secondly, the best images will be shown in a photo exhibition whichwill disseminate this experience as much as possible. Finally, this pedagogical innovation will be embodied in the publication ofseveral didactic units in different languages so that they can be used in schools anywhere in Europe. Therefore the estimated impactis not just limited to tackle the pedagogical lines in the participant schools but it also aims to provide a contemporary look to historyfor the record. Besides, these new lines of work will get consolidated by the search for new contacts on the e-twinning websitewanting to collaborate as guests, so that we could gather a common historical photographic legacy to work with and we could keepon producing new materials never collected before.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 97484 Eur

Project Coordinator

INS Barres i Ones & Country: ES

Project Partners

• Siauliu Lieporiu gimnazija
• ACROPOLIS LYCEUM
• UNESCO-Schule Kamp-Lintfort