Becoming a junior facilitator: discovering our and others’ cultural heritage and sports facilities Erasmus Project

Project Title

Becoming a junior facilitator: discovering our and others’ cultural heritage and sports facilities

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 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Creativity and culture; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Teaching and learning of foreign languages

Project Summary

Our “collège Mathurin Régnier”, situated in Chartres, is a secondary school welcoming sports school sections hosting several sports such as handball, football and swimming. Our school has had different sports sections for over a decade and we were able to quantify positively that our students, on the whole, succeed better thanks to these sections even if they are not part of these sections. Our sports sections are part of an agreement with the PE regional branch of the Academy of Orle-ans-Tours. Our sports sections concern 102 students from Year 7 to Year 10, or one student out of 6 attending our school.
The sports sections give an identity and a specificity to our “Collège Mathurin Ré-gnier” which is recognized for its teaching skills of welcoming and monitoring stu-dents from these sections.
They are positive for our school because they enhance its image, enrich the training opportunities at a regional level and promote a real geographic, social and cultural diversity.
As six of our colleagues have discovered different school systems through Europe for two years thanks to an Erasmus + key one project, we got motivated to build up partnerships with European schools and offer new, original and innovative opportunities to our students. Indeed, our school used to have exchanges with British and German schools but we never took part in an Erasmus project.
We created a steering group with 5 colleagues (out of the six who participated in the Erasmus + key one project) in December 2018 in order to coordinate partnerships with schools. The colleagues involved in this steering group teach different subjects (Art, Music, History, geography and English). This shows the diversity of our group; which is very enriching when creating this project. Each colleague can actually participate according to their skills.
We want to use this new project to increase the dynamic and openness to others and to the difference among our students. We also aim at strengthening moti-vation and developing the academic ambition of our students; which is often poor because of their social backgrounds. Indeed, more than half of our students come from the poorest social classes.
Through the Erasmus + project, we want to pursue our desire for diversity and openness to Europe through the knowledge of others, i.e. their education, their culture, their traditions but also their sports and cultural practices. The common use of English will allow positive exchanges with our Estonian and Italian partners.
We want all our Year 10 students, in 2020-2021, then all our Year 11 students in 2021-2022 to participate in the project. Around 40 students will be offered a physical mobility abroad (20 to each destination) and receive about the same number of students from our two partner schools.
We want to highlight the necessary use of English as a common language through Europe; that is why we deliberately chose to make the use of this language as one of our priorities.
We find it important to receive students from Estonia and Italy at the same time in order to highlight the ideas of sharing, tolerance, openness to others and mutual understanding that are at the core of this project.
Many visits will be organized in connection with our project, in France and abroad. We have particularly targeted artistic, cultural and sporting places. Our students will become cultural junior facilitators and ambassadors to report on their experiences.
Thanks to eTwinning, we are starting to create a link between our different schools. We will intensify our use of this platform in order to strengthen our partnership and prepare for physical mobility.
As our problem shows it (“Becoming a junior facilitator: discovering our and others’ cultural heritage and sports facilities”), our priority is to give power to our students by opening up to each other in a common language, making discover their cultural heritage and sports facilities but also by enriching themselves when meeting each other virtually or physically. Thanks to the eTwinning platform we are weaving a strong bond between students, between teachers. These exchanges will continue with a physical exchange between our establishments during which the students will be real actors of their mobility, by producing reports and small videos or presentations.
We want our students to be involved in this project of European openness in order to allow them to develop social skills by meeting the other, finding motivation and making progress in their school career.
Not forgetting that France will host the Olympic Games in 2024, and in the perspective of “Paris 2024” ‘we thus wish to develop in our pupils the feeling of a true European belonging and help them build their European citizenship in parallel with their national citizenship.
If this first project is accepted, we are willing to continue our European adventure: perpetuating partnerships with schools abroad in the future is a priority for our school.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 89965 Eur

Project Coordinator

Collège Mathurin Régnier & Country: FR

Project Partners

• Maardu Gymnasium
• Istituto Comprensivo M.K.Gandhi