BreaKing Stereotypes Erasmus Project

Project Title

BreaKing Stereotypes

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: International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Cultural heritage/European Year of Cultural Heritage

Project Summary

BreKS project has 6 partners and contact teachers have been working together in previous KA2 projects, but not all together. Contact persons have several years experience of international cooperation and KA2 projects and this will benefit greatly our project.
Our schools are located around Europe: Finland in the North, Italy in the South, Denmark and Netherlands in the West and Slovenia and Romania in the East. Our schools differ in size and character, as we have one 10th class, vocational schools and high schools participating in this project. Some schools have very multicultural students, some not. These kind of backgrounds will offer us a tremendeous opportunity to compare our cultural habits and gain more information of each others. Each of our partners have a very skilled and motivated teams of teachers who are enthusiastic about the project.
The need for this project raises from the fact that populistic parties around Europe have been gaining more and more votes for them self and this might lead to a narrowminded nationalism. Our project wants to make students think and explore the most meaningful aspects of their culture, to teach them to others during mobilities and this way as the amount of real information of our cultures increases the stereotypes and wrong information decreases. Students will be the active members of the project, as they explore what topics are the most important for them about their own culture. During the project students become more conscious about their own culture, learning at the same time real facts about other cultures and this will give us the possibility to compare our cultures during mobilities and enhance the mutual understanding and tolerance which we need in European level.
Our project defines ”culture” in a broad way, we have chosen four themes, of which all groups will prepare a teaching lesson for others. Themes food, history, nature and sports/dance are kind of building blocks of each country’s culture. These themes posess very many facts and angles, but we want to explore what does the nowadays’ young people think to be the most meaningful ones. All of these themes have shaped over the years both our national and our personal identities. In BreKS there will be 4 mobilities with 7 students and 2 teachers from each school. Students are aged 15-18. In the first year C2 Slovenia, theme history and C3 Romania, theme sport/dance. In the second year C5 Italy, theme food and C6 Finland, theme nature. In addition we shall have one training for teaches in the first year in C1 Denmark and the second one next year in C4 Netherlands. Planning will happen with students in virtual meetings VM1 and VM3 before the mobilities.
For teachers we have a specific task. In each school there is a certain culture or atmosphere, and this is what we want our teachers to monitor, explore and to make a developmental plan for their school. School culture is about the facts how students are taken into consideration during differents decisions, how students can make an influence to school’s practises, is there events for enhancing group coherence, how are the breaks and timetables at school etc. Teachers will monitor and observe the school cultures in each of our schools and they will have the opportunity to compare their thoughts and ideas in the two teachers training we will have.
Evaluation will happen in virtual meetings VM2 and VM4 with students in each Spring and the final evaluation with teachers in their VM5 virtual meeting. As we have expertise among our teachers about Twinspace, we will use that platform in our virtual meetings.
Sharing responsibilities is important in a project. Each team writes a report after their activity, each participant fills up a feedback questionnaire and evaluations will be dealed with in teachers’ meetings during each of our activities. This way we are able to develop our project and solve quicly any problem we might have. Sharing has started in our team already during planning and writing the application, that we have done it in mutual cooperation.
We will store our results and good practises to Twinspace as well as to project´s homepage, they will be open for public. Our plan is to disseminate our results through web in eTwinning, Instagram and live, as with presentations and posters. All partners are ready to continue collaborating with each others after this Project and use the good practises made by teachers in their school-culture task. Long-term benefits of our Project will be seen as the athmosphere at our schools enhances which will influence the motivation and ethusiasm of the students. In addition our staff will gain many new ideas and skills for future international cooperation.
Hopefully our Project produces more responsible, open-minded and tolerant citizens in Europe, which will help Europe´s development.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 197163 Eur

Project Coordinator

Joutsan lukio & Country: FI

Project Partners

• The Upper-Secondary School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Technical Gymnasium Ljubljana
• IIS CASSATA GATTAPONE
• Helinium
• Liceul Teoretic “Tudor Arghezi”
• kerteminde 10. klasse center