European Citizenship – Shaping A Transnational Identity Erasmus Project

Project Title

European Citizenship – Shaping A Transnational Identity

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 : Strategic Partnerships for Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Migrants’ issues; Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

The corona crisis just highlights the existing problems of the European Union and its member states. Reflexively, they try to make political decisions on a national level in order to stem the pandemic, what mainly results in engrossing self-interests. A coordinated and successful line of actions between the different members does not exist apart from a small number of exceptions.
The suboptimal crisis management of populist governments at least shows us that working together in a globalized and digitalized world is irremissible. But we should not forget that joint action always finds its basis in joint understanding. As a pure trade association Europe and the EU remain an empty framework that has to be filled with life.
We perceive our project as only a small component in creating a European awareness in students, teachers and parents. The construction of a European citizenship has to function as a metaphor for a European identity, which is based on empathy and mutual understanding and which includes respecting cultural differences enclosing national and regional identities and our cultural heritage on a national level.
During the project our students gained fundamental competences in the areas of social sciences and the humanities while they tried to define their local/regional/national identities and compared them with those defined at our partner schools. They worked out similarities and differences with help of different forms of gaining information and knowledge like taking part in workshops, listening to presentations and visiting organisations outside school.
The following examples should be mentioned as a selection out of many activities:
On a political level: the visit to the regional parliament in Murcia in order to get to know the daily process of finding political decisions on a regional level, a workshop in Spain in order to examine and evaluate the possibilities for students to be part of official school councils;
On a historical level: the visit to the ethnographic national museum in Tartu in order to get to know the Estonian culture especially its roots, the visit to the UN world heritage Corvey which is known as a starting point of extensive Christianisation in broad parts of Europe;
On a literary level: the joint staging of national fairy tales and myths and their basic topoi and narratives;
On a musical level: a workshop on traditional music instruments and classical composers and singing the European anthem;
On an artificial level: the creation of traditional Christmas cards and the development of a project logo, which underlines our similarities;
On a sport level: a comparison of our most popular traditional types of sport and the presentation of unknown traditional games which were played together and implemented in sports lessons as well.
The decision to include the topic “migrants and refugees” into our project made it possible to broaden the scope beyond the European dimension. That this is in dire need can be seen in examples like the catastrophe of Moria and the following inactivity of the EU and most of its member states. It definitely will be a challenge to face this problem together without denying fundamental values like human rights. Presentations and workshops given by the Spanish department of Amnesty International and the visit to an SOS Children’s Village near Zagreb illustrated this need. The stay at church organisations in Paderborn, in order to have an insight into the topic of integration to some extent, had to be cancelled due to the corona crisis.
Building up structured media literacy in the students (for example independent information procurement, dealing with media, verification of sources etc.) can only be an obligatory basis for the development of further learning techniques. In a world in which a lot of adults and students use social media as their primary source of information, the relevance of editorially supervised transmission of information decreases and one only acts via content-free captions, this basement can only be seen as being highly important. Especially those enemies of a common European identity make use of those means. One workshop in Voru examined the formation of, the motivation behind and the possibilities of unmasking fake news. In Vaala we learned how to use digital media in different situations in school in an appropriate way.
Everybody in this project gained the main insight that our similarities are the basis for a European community, which is already woven together on an economical and cultural level. A change in the humans mentality on the other side will be an evolutionary process.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 155698 Eur

Project Coordinator

Friedrich-Spee-Gesamtschule Paderborn & Country: DE

Project Partners

• IES SABINA MORA
• Osnovna skola Zaprudje
• Debreceni Árpád Vezér Általános Iskola
• Kääpa Põhikool
• Vaalan yhtenäiskoulu