Welcome to our town – Welcome to new friends Erasmus Project

Project Title

Welcome to our town – Welcome to new friends

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 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Migrants’ issues; Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning; Integration of refugees

Project Summary

„Welcome to our town – welcome to new friends“ – this is the title of our project.
We are 5 schools from Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Turkey. Each school has experiences with migration, minorities and heterogeneity. In our project we aim to improve the development and the climate at our schools.
Welcome to our town – welcome to new friends – this includes several aspects.
During our project we create an app for mobile phones. It will be an app that shows the city map of each partner school, where all points of interests are marked and explained. Our students will write, draw, make audios/videos for filling this app with information. First they will discuss what is interesting to show: typical houses, schools, playing grounds, sights, favourite places of our students … In our app all points of interests will be shown in different categories (shown by different colours).
For really welcoming everybody (tourists, migrants, refugees…) we plan to translate these descriptions to many languages. For this work all people with knowledge of foreign languages at our schools are involved to create a multilingual application. We have many migrants and we want them to take part as experts for languages. So our students with migration background as well as their parents and families will be precious and important for our project. We plan to organize regularily meetings (language-cafés) for this common work. At our language-cafés parents with migration background will also teach songs/words/sentences in their native language. During these language-cafés they can meet and get in contact with other people. Hopefully they can feel during this work that they are welcome to our towns and welcome to new friends. We hope that this common work will change the climate at our schools and communities to a climate of openness, integration and tolerance. Being different should be noticed as chance and enrichment.
After the 2 years of project work we will pay for the licenses for Google Play Store for Android and Apple App Store, so that our app will be available for one more year for everybody. We can imagine that after this year the tourist informations of our towns will be interested in going on with this application. Such an application is a big chance for us to show our ideas of welcoming and involving many different people not only in our region but to much more. We want to show to as many people as possible that in our project people from different countries, with different cultures and religions work together as friends. We hope that by using the app many people will get to know our project, get to know Erasmus and have positive associations with Europe.
This project is also a chance for a positive development at our schools. During those 2 years we plan to visit each partner school for one week. During these weeks teachers from all partners will meet at the same place and get to know the school system and the special aspects of each partner’s school. We will focus espacially on the methods how the partners are dealing with heterogeneity, because each partner has very interesting approaches (for example open education, inclusion, special learning environments, learning ladders, bilingualism…) By exchanging our experiences and learning from our partners we expect a positive development at our own schools.
Welcome to our town – welcome to new friends – this concernes also our contacts to our partners.
Our students will get in contact with the children from other countries by exchanging letters and art works. They will meet each other in chats and skype-conferences. They will explain each other their hometowns by exchanging the information they prepared for the app. We expect that our common work for the app and the contacts with students from other countries will teach our students that diversity is a chance and an enrichment, so that they can feel togetherness with students from other countries.
Digitization is the method for reaching our aims. For filling the application with information our students will use new media a lot. So we expect also to improve their IT competences during our project.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 103626 Eur

Project Coordinator

Grundschule Treuchtlingen & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Piri Mehmet Pasa Ortaokulu
• Istituto Comprensivo M. L. Niccolini
• Bonyhadi Petofi Sandor Evangelikus Gimnazium es Kollegium
• Jyväskylän kristillisen koulun yhdistys ry