A Cultural and Linguistic Journey Erasmus Project

Project Title

A Cultural and Linguistic Journey

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 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Cultural heritage/European Year of Cultural Heritage; Creativity and culture; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

Coláiste Chineál Eoghain, Collège de la Vallée de l’Ouanne, and Gymnasium am Stefansberg are on a Cultural and Linguistic Journey. All schools were brought together through their interest in Irish culture and language. In the world of today all partners acknowledge the importance these two values in society. The main priorities we have chosen are the acquiring and development of basic competences as well as building capacity of skills within all our schools with the innovation of learning periods abroad. We intend to realise these aspirations through the topics of creativity and culture, cultural heritage, EU ctizenship, EU awareness and democracy. All schools have communicated up to this point and have agreed upon a number of strategies to progess our objectives. All three schools bring the necessary interest in these topics as we have demonstrated in our initial contacts.

Communication via the eTwinning platform, the Erasmus+ results platform, the school education gateway, emailing, social media, phone calls, and real time meetings have all brought us to a particular level of progress where all facilitators have agreed on the common objectives. All participants and accompanying persons are relatively inexperienced in the challenges of communication on this scale but we look forward to the problem solving with all the technologies available to us. In this global world we aim to improve our communication skills and thus enrich ourselves as well as those around us.

Coláiste Chineál Eoghain is a small, temporary school teaching and learning through the medium of the Irish language. Collège de la Vallée de l’Ouanne is a medium sized school with a new special needs class opening next year. Gymnasium am Stefansberg is a large school situated near the border with Luxembourg. All our schools bring a unique angle to the project and that sense of identity is linked to our cultures and languages. We are also Europeans and that sense of identity will be fully explored in this project. European citizens from our countries will make that connection. A new topic recently added to our objectives has been Brexit. This topic resonates with all Europeans and deserves a lot of attention.

All three schools have decided to create informative, creative, happy, challenging, healthy, and respectful activities to investigate our priorities. We intend to engage all participants using a myriad of strategies, talents, interests, and passions. We hope to explore as many attitudes to our cultures and languages and to present our findings to as many people as we can and via as many channels of communication as possible. We look forward to a spirit of community where friendships begin and tolerance of other cultures and languages increases.

Our project seeks to:
Develop a basic conversational linguistic resource for all languages used by the participants.
Create a piece of theatre, drama, music, poetry, or prose to reflect a cultural aspect of the participants.
To create a piece of artwork that reflects the teaching and learning culture in the schools involved. School ethos is an example here.
To create a presentation on the topic of Brexit from the points of view of the different EU countries.
To present a number of case studies on the idea of local, regional, national, European, and global citizenship.
To compare the national sport of each country and learn some basic skills from each of those sports.
To investigate various culinary dishes from the variety of cultures or traditions participating.
To investigate the effect of religion on culture

Outcomes include:
Designing a conversational language product to allow quick, basic conversation with phonetics included in English
To create a number of musical, artistic, poetic, prose, etc. pieces to allow an exhibition.
To organise a league or championship for the representative sports from all participants.
To facilitate a culture day for each of the three strategic exchanges.
To facilitate a debate for the participants with local politicians.
Increased confidence and social interaction due to new friends and new challenges.

All schools feel privileged to be able to participate in a project where they can work beyond the realms of a set curriculum. We, the participants, look forward to our Cultural and Linguistic Journey and we invite you all to join us.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 12168,11 Eur

Project Coordinator

Coláiste Chineál Eoghain & Country: IE

Project Partners

• Collège de la Vallée de l’Ouanne
• Gymnasium am Stefansberg