Water … why? Aqua … à quoi? Raising awareness and sensitivity for a responsible use of water through cooperative scientific inquiry following the nature of science approach. Erasmus Project

Project Title

Water … why? Aqua … à quoi? Raising awareness and sensitivity for a responsible use of water through cooperative scientific inquiry following the nature of science approach.

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 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Environment and climate change; Natural sciences; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

Aqua … à quoi? Raising awareness and sensitivity for a responsible use of water through cooperative scientific inquiry following the nature of science approach.
Our goal is to implement the European idea in various ways into science lessons within our schools. In the framework of fostering international competence, we would like to intensify and expand European connections and provide a variety of – virtual as well as face-to-face – encounters of the participating 100 students from these four countries.
Specifically, this means we would like to initiate an intensive exposure of our students to the encompassing and connecting topic “water“. Water is a habitat for extremely adapted fauna and flora, it is the source of life and an inevitable aspect of human nutrition, connected to water various jobs are created and activities enjoyed. When aquatic ecosystems are interfered with, for example through environmental changes or anthropogenous factors, this has severe consequences for the whole fabric, not only regionally but transregionally and even globally. Depicting this far-reaching dimension to adolescents, we aim to implement a practically oriented approach. A shared experimenting environment and scientific knowledge acquisition are used to work on previously developed question from multifaceted perspectives – in chemistry and biology labs, outdoor investigation, through interviewing experts and on-site research. The participating students will get to know methods of scientific knowledge acquisition that by far exceed possibilities at school, thus, they are able to broaden their methodological horizons.
The mutual cooperation of adolescents from four different countries, implemented through the specific and physical student exchange as well as mediated through digital platforms in further project phases, leads to a raised awareness concerning matters of environmental protection. Besides, questioning own attitudes and lifestyles in respect to environmental issues makes an effective change of perspective possible and eventually results in better identification with the project and shapes European awareness. This is also why we are going to engage our 16-to-17-year-old students as much as possible in planning processes throughout the project. Hence, they are going to assume responsibility for a successful project and experience themselves as part of an actively involved team, fostering motivation and individual personality development.
Four student exchanges build the key face-to-face encounters of the project. Eight students from each partner institution respectively are going to participate in each encounter, so that every student is able to experience one exchange, getting to know one of three partner countries’ culture based on the accompanying cultural program, visiting school and living in a host family. All exchange activities are going to be conducted in small multilingual and culturally mixed groups, following a CLIL approach using the lingua franca. By students previously developed multilingual dictionaries of subject-matter vocabulary will support communication, modelling the value of learning foreign languages for sciences. They are going to consider mobility and international cooperation an asset, which will unveil for them a precious glance into the world of work and universities.
As an essential factor for this project to succeed we identify a necessity of effective communication. As a consequence, the platform eTwinning is going to be utilized in order to share all outcome (e.g. documentation, pictures, videos etc.) with each participant. The discussion board and other tools are going to be used for regular exchange. Utilizing digital media is in accordance with each school’s developmental focus and, furthermore, fosters motivation following the zeitgeist of students. Thus, the students’ and teachers’ digital competence can be expanded.
All project outcome, in form of digital material for classes as well as extensive documentation via a digital magazine, will be made public to a wider audience – school community, parents, other schools, local media etc.– to sustainably highlight the project’s significance. For all participating schools the project provides a fostered international focus and an expansion of existing contacts in respect to future projects.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 125779 Eur

Project Coordinator

Modellschule Obersberg & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Zespol Szkol nr 2 im. Jana Pawla II
• Istituto di Istruzione Superiore MARZOTTO-LUZZATTI
• Lycée Général et technologique Charles de Gaulle