Food, Environment and Sport. Let’s Be Healthier! Adopting and Adapting Good Practices to Transform Our Communities. Erasmus Project

Project Title

Food, Environment and Sport. Let’s Be Healthier! Adopting and Adapting Good Practices to Transform Our Communities.

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 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Social/environmental responsibility of educational institutions; Health and wellbeing; Energy and resources

Project Summary

Our FES plan was born as an eTwinning project back in 2017. This meant a key starting point which enabled the participants to meet up and learn new strategies to work together and cooperate in reaching a common aim. After the eTwinning cooperation, we got an Erasmus + KA229 grant and participants aged 14-15 years old could join the project. They could partially enjoy a life-changing opportunity to learn, experience, adopt and adapt good practices in a different socio-cultural context, also create a blog, a collaborative TwinSpace and a documentary focused on the experience and on the project. The participants involved in the 1st and 2nd mobilities could live in a different context and be aware of the way two European countries cooperate to reach a common end. However, the COVID19 pandemic situation meant that mobilities could no longer be feasible, so the Erasmus Team was forced to adapt and seek for virtual strategies in order to achieve the objectives that we initially had.
So, in the first year the aims were fully accomplished because the participants could adopt and adapt good sustainable and healthy practices, acquire the skills to use the necessary ICT tools to create their project, learn about a different culture and traditions, value their own culture and traditions, achieve relevant strategies and ways to work cooperatively, value and use each student’s best skills, become creative agents in transforming the community, acquire the skills to become critical to certain practices, seek strategies in the country they work with that enrich their own lifestyles, assess the impact of the actions which are carried out, acquire communicative skills to use in front of a camera and use English as a lingua franca. The objectives were successfully achieved during the 1st and 2nd year mobilities because both teachers and participants filled in 2 questionnaires and the results were very positive. In view of the results obtained, we can reach the conclusion that the participants consider the exchange experience more valuable and life-changing than the project itself. We include all these results in the TwinSpace and in the Platform of Results. During the 1st and 2nd mobilities in 2019 the students were divided in 4 different work-groups and they were in charge of focusing on one of the main topics we wanted them to analyse: food, environment, sport and the students exchange experience. 45 students from both countries recorded their experiences and created different videos, finally a compilation of all the videos was edited. Our priority was that they developed relevant and high-quality skills and competences to accomplish these goals and this was partially achieved because unfortunately the 2020 pandemic limited all the objectives and priorities to a virtual context. During 2020 and 2021 5 different online meetings were held with the students and teachers and we encouraged the 40 new students involved to work on the project in a different way. They couldn’t design a video unfortunately but they continued uploading content both on the blog and the TwinSpace.
In the first year, the team organised varied and concurrent activities which were linked to the exchange of good practices regarding sustainability and healthy lifestyle: video-meetings, visits, workshops or masterclasses always covering the 3 main topics: environment, food and sport. The participants acquired a critical attitude and they also learnt to value and appreciate their own good practices.
In the second year, the participants shared their posters related to the 3 topics of our FES project and they also devoted one session to debate about ways to cope with COVID-19. They also worked in heterogeneous Latvian-Spanish groups to design posters together and then they introduced them to all the participants, including the two headmasters and the Erasmus Team members.
Since the final product was not completed the students could not display their work in their corresponding Sustainability Council webpage. However, we also used other sources and social media to spread our students’ work. The participants had the chance to achieve the objectives, however being prevented from travelling didn’t let them live the experience as fully as the first year participants.
Regarding the dissemination in the schools, the 1st year participants shared all these activities with students at their schools who are a year younger and who could eventually join the project. Workshops were organised to debate and talk about the project itself using the TwinSpace, the Blog and the documentary to spotlight their explanations and also to sort out the questions that the future participants could have. The sessions were a success and as a result today we have a lot more students interested in joining an Erasmus experience in comparison to the petitions we had back in 2018.
All the channels that we have used to spread and disseminate our project are open for consultation and are free to get any updates related to the 2018-21 project and also to the future cooperation agreement that has been established among different countries: Germany, Estonia, Finland and Latvia to continue working on issues related to improving our environment and our own lifestyle. The Erasmus Team considers that this project has been a starting point and a source of inspiration to develop a project with more experience which has been obtained all through these years of working cooperatively either through eTwinning initially and through an Erasmus partnership later. We regard ourselves as more prepared and trained to engage a new group of students to join a new project and create quality products in the future. Both our schools and their future students will surely benefit of this expertise.

Project Website

http://feschallenge.wordpress.com/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 48757 Eur

Project Coordinator

Institut Manuel de Montsuar & Country: ES

Project Partners

• Talsu 2.vidusskola