Showing off in Warmia-Masuria Erasmus Project

Project Title

Showing off in Warmia-Masuria

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: Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Creativity and culture; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

We work in an educational priority area, and we are regularly confronted with pupils who truant or drop out. Most of our pupils come from disadvantaged backgrounds and have limited access to culture. They have few opportunities of discovering Europe and the world. In Saint Brieuc, there is an association that maintains strong links between French Côtes d’Armor and Warmia-Masuria in Poland. Their aim is to develop mutual knowledge of European citizens and to teach and explain the shared history of both countries. It is through this association that we have started our partnership with Podstawowa nr 34 im. Jozefa Malewskiego school in Warmia Masuria.

We want our pupils to be reconciled with school thanks to Art, History and Humanist Culture. We are convinced that the latter are a strong lever to motivate students in danger of dropping out. We want our pupils to be open to the outside world so they can look to the future with more lucidity. We wish to get them accustomed to attending litterary and art works, we hope to arouse their commitment and reflection on their own opinions and feelings, we want to give meaning to their learning, we wish to build the taste for ambition and excellence. We want to stimulate their cultural openness and their intellectual curiosity.

The project is aimed at a class of 27 pupils in their third year of Secondary School aged 13 to 14. We will publish the project and invite applications in our school, then we will select or encourage the pupils according to the following criteria: disadvantaged socio-professional categories, dropping out of school, potential that needs to be revealed, motivation for the project, social and academic diversity. We will also include handicapped pupils (from the ULIS class of our school, which is dedicated to children with learning disability).

We will diversify the activities: they will visit museums of National Résistance in Côtes-d’Armor and in Paris, we will discover the theatres of our respective towns (attend shows, meet showbusiness professionals), they will perform music with the town conservatoire, they will do drama in English with a professional company, they will be taught many languages (Polish/ French/ English) and exchange with penpals, they will travel to Paris to meet their Polish friends and work on identity and otherness, they will create a musical about French and European identity destined to be performed on a national Polish stage in Olsztyn.

We will set up an experimental class with an artistic profile that will work with the same teachers for two successive years.
We will adjust the timetables to enable project based-approach, co-animation and interdisciplinarity, the teaching hours will be annualised and a weekly two-hour time slot will thus be created and will be alloted to artistic practice. Four teachers will take part in this two-hour lesson (French, musical education, history geography and English). The class will then be divided into two groups to enable real personalisation. Our partners will easily be able to take part in this time-slot.
Pupils will be free to give their opinion on the methods and concrete objectives because we will further constructive exchanges, commitment and personal opinions. We will organise project meetings fo the teaching team regularly.

We hope to manage to overcome truancy from school by rekindling our students’ interest in developing skills useful across the different subjects (concentration, commitment, oral and written expression, methodology). We think we can effectively overcome the weight of social disadvantage and unequal access to culture as we will knock down the barriers between our pupils and the cultural places of their town, and, thanks to artistic parctices we will also renew contact with families who are too often unwilling to come to school. We would like to give these students a taste for ambition and excellence and we would like them to free themselves from the impediment they naturally feel regarding their choice of career. Finally, we expect to develop a better self esteem.
In the long term, we hope to train young people who will be open to the diversity of human situations and who will like travelling. We are banking on this project’s spreading out of the classroom and influencing other pupils and colleagues. This innovation could enable our school to enter an international dimension and it could open a new field of teaching experiments. Finally, our school, which is located in a socially sensitive area could find a new breath of fresh air, which would boost recruitment and improve its tarnished image thanks to communication about this project.

Project Website

https://twinspace.etwinning.net/71206/home

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 56153,46 Eur

Project Coordinator

Collège Jean Racine & Country: FR

Project Partners

• Szkola Podstawowa nr 34 im. Jozefa Malewskiego