Appreciating our native culture and heritage with a focus on sport Erasmus Project

Project Title

Appreciating our native culture and heritage with a focus on sport

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: Cultural heritage/European Year of Cultural Heritage

Project Summary

Context/Background – Having been involved in a Comenius project in the past, we found the experience extremely rewarding, and feel now is the appropriate time to revive lines of communication and renew partnerships with our peers in Europe. With the ever evolving political situation in Europe, we are acutely aware of Ireland’s location as an island nation on the edge of Europe, and wish to bolster ties with our European neighbours and colleagues. Having partaken in previous projects, we have experienced first-hand, the benefits of opening our school and local communities to our wider European neighbours and feel now is a right time to strengthen these bonds and once again look outwards towards our European partners and contemporaries.

Objectives – Ireland has a strong sense of national identity, and a love for our national heritage, culture and customs. Through this project, we aim to share our unique indigenous cultural and social heritage with our partners, and hope to learn about their cultures in return. We aim to give them an insight and taste of how our native culture and heritage has organically grown and developed through visits to local heritage spots and partaking in various sporting and cultural activities. We hope the visit from our partners would also help to foster a sense of awareness of Ireland belonging to a wider European community within our pupils, and will encourage this by carrying out research and preparing activities before, during and after the visit. We will also use this fantastic opportunity to view teaching best practices taking place in differing countries and cultural settings, and to take this home and integrate them into our school community.

Number/Profile Participants –

Description of Activities – We plan to use local coaches of our indigenous sport, Gaelic football, to teach our visitors the basic rules and skills of Gaelic Football/Hurling and to participate in a fun coaching session. We also aim to bring them to a local Gaelic /Football match where they can see a game being played by two local teams.
We will employ an expert from the heritage council who will come to the school and give a cookery demonstration on some traditional Irish cuisine. Our partners will then get the opportunity to participate by cooking and tasting some Irish specialities themselves.
Many of our pupils partake in various forms of traditional Irish dancing and music, and they will perform a concert in school showcasing these talents for our visiting partners.
We will arrange a visit to the Seamus Heaney Centre, a museum at the birthplace of our Noble-Prize winning laureate, and won of the most famous exponents of Irish literature – Seamus Heaney.
Prior to our partner’s arrival, the children will carry out research on our European friends, learning about the history, culture, and language of the visiting nations. Our pupils will display these projects around the school during the visit. This will help to raise an awareness of Ireland being part of a wider European community.

Methodology – Active learning will be our priority for this project. We have already started our pre project discussions, and have had some brainstorming sessions with our prospective partners in order to determine what type of activities would be of most benefit to everybody. Our project will include out of school visits as well as in school learning experiences for our pupils, staff and partners. Our pupils will conduct personal interviews with their European peers via Skype and diaries will be kept for the duration of the project. After each flow reports will be written up and presentations will be made to our own schools on our return. Journals will be kept throughout he project and these will be used during our collaborations and reflective exercises.

Results and Impact Envisaged – We envisage participation in the project having a large impact on our school community as we seek to highlight our membership of a broader European partnership and through the implementation of best practices experienced on our visits. In preparing our pupils for the visit, they will carry out in-depth research on our partner’s countries of origin, and on the European Union in general. This will help to highlight to them, Ireland’s position as a member of a strong union, and realise that we may have differing indigenous cultures to our neighbours, but also share many cultural bonds.

Longer Term Benefits –
We envisage that we will remain in contact with our European partners and will continue to build connections and share good practices into the future. With the use of ICT the pupils who are introduced to each other as part of this project will continue to grow together and become familiar with the cultures and heritage of their European peers.
Our children will identify with being Irish, but will also see themselves as being part of the wider European community.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 73557,36 Eur

Project Coordinator

Woodland N.S. & Country: IE

Project Partners

• Osnovna skola Marjan
• Istituto Comprensivo Melvin Jones Orazio Comes
• PLATON SCHOOL S.A.
• Szkola Podstawowa nr 14 z Oddzialami Sportowymi i Integracyjnymi im. Polskich Olimpijczykow