The Battle Against the Sea Erasmus Project

Project Title

The Battle Against the Sea

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: Cultural heritage/European Year of Cultural Heritage; Teaching and learning of foreign languages; Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning

Project Summary

The Battle against the Sea is an Erasmus+ project between two schools, Colegio Inmaculada of Alicante and International School of Almere. Both Alicante and Almere are coast line cities, which is their similarities, but opposite when it comes to the way they have battled against the sea to develop their history. The project’s backbone is the sea, which unites Almere’s and Alicante’s history. We raise a three blocks structure: the battle against the sea, the sea’s trace, and the historical
connections.

Our project’s objectives are:
-To show our students that Almere, the newest city in the Netherlands were the country is made of the human-made landscape, has culture, art, nature, history and much more. Flevoland has Almere as the newest city in the Netherlands. In contrast, to show our students that Alicante, a city developed mainly by and because of being a seashore city, has also its cultural heritage and compare the similarities and differences with Almere.
-To let the students, understand that natural landscapes and man-made landscapes are decisive for the cultural heritage of a country.
-Compare the different ways of battling against the sea in both cities regarding their history and their geographical location.
-Cultural Heritage: to make our students aware of the relevance of the sea in both cultures and even though their differences, they end up developing common activities for both countries economies through out history: fishing and sailing.
-Discover and understand the historical relationship between Spain and Holland searching for cultural similarities between both countries because of their previous common past.
-Reflect about how intolerance and fundamentalism can lead to confrontation.
-Help the less economical favoured students so that they can participate in our project. The participants in our project will be 15 students per school per year. Their age will range between 13 and 15 years of age and the candidates will be selected in Alicante by having at least a B1 English level and good grades in their previous year final report. Candidates from Almere must be in the Spanish class. Two teachers from Alicante will travel to Almere with their students and 3 from Almere
will do the same with theirs during the activities periods. The activities will be short-term exchanges of groups of pupils traveling first in October from Alicante to Almere and then in April from Almere to Alicante. This will be done in the two years of the project. This activities will be tasks to be developed in the schools and cultural heritage and nature landscapes visits to observe on first hand Alicante’s and Almere’s battle against the sea. The school tasks will be implemented by cooperative work in small groups and web research in an autonomous way.

The main expected results we want our students to obtain are:
– to know how Land reclamation is achieved. The students will know the Cultural and World Heritage places of Flevoland and Alicante and how the process of desertification affects the latter city.
– to learn the fact that the province of Flevoland has almost completely been reclaimed from the Zuiderzee.
– to improve our student’s ability for cooperative work as well as for researching throughout the web.
– to familiarize with all the concepts and history about the Dutch and Spanish, and their battle against the sea.
– to experience the enrichment from a cultural exchange being several days in another country living in a host family from the hosting school.
– to improve our students English and Spanish level by being several days in a linguistic immersion atmosphere.
– to strengthen our student’s self-autonomy by spending several days away from home.

By achieving all the objectives mentioned and producing the results above we will be promoting the acquisition of skills and competences of our students as well as strengthening the profile of our teachers involved. All of this will lead us to promote our most relevant priority, the social and educational value of the European cultural heritage.

The impact we expect in both communities will be big enough to affect all the students in both schools and their families and all the teachers. We also expect an impact in both cities aided by the local press and both schools social media. Through eTwinning we aim to impact many schools across Europe that will look for inspiration in our project’s TwinSpace. And we will also try to reach the whole Jesuit Education Community through Educate Magis.
For our potential longer term benefits we would really like to have a clear feeling that Almere International School is a real partner to Inmaculada School, working in future Erasmus+ projects with students mobilities and others with teacher mobilities. We truly believe that this will make both schools communities more aware of what it means to be citizens of the EU. We want to bring the European spirit to all our members.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 64832 Eur

Project Coordinator

Colegio Inmaculada & Country: ES

Project Partners

• International School of Almere