Healthy Living; Eco acting. Health and sustainability through Arts Erasmus Project

Project Title

Healthy Living; Eco acting.
Health and sustainability through Arts

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: Health and wellbeing; Creativity and culture; Environment and climate change

Project Summary

*All 4 schools shared a common need to enhance and develop the awareness, skills, and competencies of our students referred to health and sustainability.
As art is creation, this was a privileged field to develop creativity and it was used in close cooperation with these social issues in order to help students to develop their creativity to face these social issues. That’s why we used arts (poetry, arts, and crafts, music, dance, theatre, photography, video, …) to express the outcomes, achievements, and conclusions of this project.
Objectives
Health and sustainability are two really vast fields; to get tangible outcomes, we focused on a few aspects emerging from the needs previously detected.
We also faced these issues by developing our students’ entrepreneurship, as they have to know how to take decisions with an important impact in their health and in the environment.
By using arts to express outcomes, we wanted to improve the integration of the arts in the curriculum, giving them a social dimension.
We wanted to increase teachers’ and students’ creativity, intermingling and feedbacking creativity and awareness.
We wanted to improve our schools’ engagement with these challenges and to increase the presence of these issues in our schools.
Participants
The participants in this project were mainly students and teachers, but not only.
The main participants were students aged 14-15. Some 400 took part in the learning activities and many more participated in the school activities previous to the learning activities. In total, about 1700 people benefited from the project.
Teachers participating in the project were those who were responsible for the management of the project and the teaching the activities, other teachers who cooperated in the activities, and almost all teachers’ staffs who benefited of the internationalization of the school.
Other participants were:
Families hosting foreign students in the learning activities
External experts who taught concrete aspects of the project, and other stakeholders as companies that students visited.
Town halls that received students’ proposals
Citizens in general from our villages and towns who enjoyed and shared those artworks that students made in public places.
Activities and methodology
The project was divided into 4 periods, each one dealing with a field of study:
1: Healthy and sustainable school lifestyle
2: Healthy personal lifestyle
3: Sustainable individual lifestyle
4: Health and sustainability in Society
According to this plan, the activities dealt with:
The current state of environmental responsibility in each school.
The creation of green commandos.
School waste reduction.
Increasing the % of students going to school by sustainable means.
Cooking healthy recipes.
Physical activities in nature. Making proposals to the town hall and to PE teachers.
Differences between agroindustry and agroecology.
Reducing our carbon footprint
The origin of the clothes we wear
Experiencing doing it by oneself
Advantages of local seasonal products
Building energetically sustainable devices
Growing eco products in our school gardens
Water and air pollution
A logo competition
Expressing results using different art languages and techniques
Methodologies to achieve the maximum involvement and proactivity of the students were used: project-based learning, empowerment, cooperative teamwork, peer learning.
In each period, all core activities begin in each school- in online contact with partners – and finish in the learning activity.
Making dissemination artifacts to expand the worked out awareness are also core activities.
Results
The main tangible results of the project are artworks, shared teaching plans and documentation of the activities, leaflets, and proposals made by the students.
Intangible: enhancing students’ health and sustainability skills. Greater engagement of our schools with the challenges referred to sustainability and to health, a willingness of our teachers’ staffs to work on these issues with a global approach, and increasing the integration of the arts in the curriculum.
Impact
Our students and schools improved their skills in arts, health, and sustainability, and got more resources to work on them
Our schools took advantage of this internationalization and improvement in teaching. Our local communities lived part of these events
The teachers disseminated the project in professional circles
Potential long term benefits
We hope an improvement of our youngsters’ habits in health and sustainability as the project is designed to penetrate deeply in them.
Teaching in our schools improved, both in the issues of health, sustainability, and arts and also in the implementation of new methodologies. All of them are going to remain in our school.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 110935 Eur

Project Coordinator

INSTITUT D’AURO & Country: ES

Project Partners

• 4 Gymnasio Thivas (4 Junior High School of Thiva)
• Publiczna Szkola Podstawowa w Czarnej
• Mezciema pamatskola