Marche Gourmande Touristique Erasmus Project

Project Title

Marche Gourmande Touristique

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: Creativity and culture; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Early School Leaving / combating failure in education

Project Summary

This project has brought together two schools providing technical and vocational secondary education : Institut Ilon-Saint-Jacques from Namur, Belgium and Istituto Florio from Erice, Sicily.

The project was intended for tourism/hospitality students and hotel/catering students as well as their teachers. The participating students ( 15 pupils for each school) were aged from 16 to 19.

The activities carried out during the project were as follows :
– the hotel/catering studentshad been working on a research project about both a savory and a sweet culinary speciality, while the tourism students had been working on the historical and geographical presentation of a tourist site from their city and had included their thoughts on the guiding techniques best suited to the organisation of a gourmet walk. Both projects had submitted in written form as an application file.
-the files selected according to specific criteria had been be translated by the students.
-the students had created a website (http://gastropatrimotour.be/) and made use of social media to communicate between both schools, with their partners outside of school and with the public.
-every step of the guided tour had been prepared by the tourism/hospitality students selected for the trip with the help of their classmates at school.
-the Belgian students selected has gone to Sicily for 7 days during which they worked in groups. Two Belgian students had teached two Italian students how to make the regional speciality that they planned to present at the gourmet walk. A Belgian student was associated with a Italian one in order to guide the touristic places which were presented by the gourmet walk..
– On the other side the italian students came to Belgium to propose and taught their own culinary recipes.

Our methodology has focused on independent learning (through the realisation of the files) as well as collaborative learning (through group work and collaboration with external partners).

This project has been rewarding for many reasons. Our priority was to fight against students dropping out of school and to help with the problems faced by the most disadvantaged in our classrooms. In our opinion, this goal has been achieved overall. Students who were dropping out of school revealed an awareness for the importance of the school curriculum and became thoroughly involved in the project. In addition, most of the students taking part in the activities came from disadvantaged backgrounds and would not have been able to benefit from this kind of cultural exchange without the project and the help of the European Community.

Our second goal was to help our students acquire new skills and competences. We believe that this objective was partially attained. We had to make some changes so that the students really feel like they were actors in the transmission of their know-how, because at the beginning, everyone was sticking to their own ways of working and to their skills instead of learning from the others.

Introducing the concept of “marche gourmande” to the Italians was another objective of this project and we were all very pleased with the fact that the Sicilian school successfully planned a second “marche gourmande” later in the year. This goes to show how well the concept was integrated and our objective surpassed.

The students enjoyed the opportunity, through the meeting of professionals from their sector, to discover various career opportunities related to their studies. As a result, some of them finally realised how important their curriculum was and showed genuine enthusiasm for pursuing this kind of professional careers in the future. Furthermore, our students, for the most part, developed an awareness of the cultural and socio-economic differences between our two countries.

In the light of all the above, we believe that this project was a success for all the participants and an opportunity to grow and we are pleased to say that the feedback that we have received from all the parties involved absolutely confirms this sentiment. We would like this experience to take place every year in order to allow our students to work with partners and to get a glimpse at their future profession and prospects, but also to help them overcome their loss of motivation.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 21750 Eur

Project Coordinator

Institut Ilon-Saint-Jacques & Country: BE

Project Partners

• Istituto Professionale Servizi per l’enogastronomia e l’ospitalità alberghiera