GPS: Green People, environmentally friendly Schools Erasmus Project

Project Title

GPS: Green People, environmentally friendly Schools

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: EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Teaching and learning of foreign languages; Social/environmental responsibility of educational institutions

Project Summary

The project GPS, Green People, environmentally friendly schools, will take place between the school Salco-Haasrode (Belgium) and the institution IES Enric Valor-Picanya (Spain).
Since the climate marches that took place in Louvain in 2019 and of which Salco was one of the inititators, the good intentions of our students seem to have died away. In order to educate and prepare our young people to become responsible and critical adults, committed to the environment, we have created this project.
To ensure the success of the project, we will organise it for around twenty students of the last two years of each secondary school (ten students aged between 16 and 18 years old from each school a year). The majority of the students attend classes in the general education system, learning French or Spanish (or both) as a foreign language, but we will also have some Spanish-speakers from OKAN-Haasrode(reception classes for new allophone newcomers) joining the project. These students have not been integrated in the normal educational system yet and often have less chances of school-based learning and less financial means, because of their immigrant status.
Our main objective will be to reflect together upon the way we can contribute to a long-range change of mentality regarding the environment. The fact that the project will be about exchanging ideas between students of different countries and that it will stretch out over a period of two years, will undoubtedly allow for the success of the activities and their long-term impact. Furthermore, the frequent dialogues between the students will broaden their horizon.
A second objective, of course, is the encouragement of learning French and Spanish as foreign languages. The students will not only have multiple occasions to see each other, talk to each other; they will also be able to communicate in writing on TwinSpace and improve their ICT skills that way.
They will also learn how to write a letter of motivation and how to prepare an interview of application.
As a last objective, we want to encourage the open-mindedness to other cultures. What will make the project even more valuable, is that amongst our students we will have a number of young immigrants.
The activities will take place either in Spain or in Belgium, since we plan two moments of encounter a year : a first time in Haasrode in November and a second time in Picanya in March. The year after, the programme will be repeated for other students. The students will also be able to talk and write to each other during the moments provided on TwinSpace.
During the on-site visits, a significant number of activities will be provided, not only for the students taking part in the project, but also for the other students of the two final years in secondary school. In that respect, we will organise a clothing exchange market, a cooking workshop where we will teach our students how to prepare dishes with what is left in the fridge or dinner leftovers and a workshop DIY where the students will learn how to make an ecological washable alternative to cling film.
The students taking part in the program, will have the chance to discuss extensively the possible efforts to improve our environment. Therefore, we will provide an number of scientific and semi-scientific articles. The students will have to create posters and a logo for our project, they will have to conduct a poll to learn about the means of transportation used by students and teachers, do a survey on the sustainability of their school building and compare the air quality in the two schools. They will actively participate in reducing pollution by plastics by doing a plalking in Valencia. They will do several bike tours to discover and learn to appreciate green spaces as well in the area around Louvain as in Picanya.
Furthermore, they will visit the European Parliament, discover the sustainable local agricultural project “Boerencompagnie” and will be involved in activities organised by ‘Leuven 2030”.

With our project, extending over two years, we hope to change the mentality of our young adults so that they understand how important it is to take care of our planet and realize that even small efforts have significant impact !
The results of our project will be published on TwinSpace after every important phase by way of reports, pictures and videos.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 53376 Eur

Project Coordinator

Sint-Albertuscollege-Haasrode & Country: BE

Project Partners

• IES Enric Valor