“Come in and reach out! – Meeting, communicating and working open-mindedly in a globalising and developing world.“ Erasmus Project

Project Title

“Come in and reach out! – Meeting, communicating and working open-mindedly in a globalising and developing world.“

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: Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills; Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning; Social dialogue

Project Summary

The project “Come in and reach out! – Meeting, communicating and working open-mindedly in a globalising and developing world“ is a school exchange project between three schools from three different countries sharing the Christian values of their identity; the Van Lodenstein College in Amersfoort in the Netherlands, the Christian Gymnasium of Vilnius in Lithuania and the August-Hermann-Francke Gymnasium Detmold in Germany. The cooperation between the three schools, which originated through contact via the Christian associations VEBS and ACSI, has intensified over the last couple of years. An enthusiasm for a comprehensive and highly professional project was awakened through several teacher meetings, job shadowing opportunities and smaller student exchanges.

The main goal of our project is to prepare our students for living in a more international context by providing relevant opportunities for learning and through the training of key competencies such as developing media literacy and using English as a foreign language and for overcoming intercultural barriers so that student awareness for cultural and generational commonalities, differences and prejudices will be raised. Therefore, we plan on having exchanges between groups of students from the three schools to make it possible for the students to meet and communicate with each other and work on different projects together regarding the topic in-groups and out-groups. By providing opportunities for our students to meet and interact not only with Christians but also with non-Christians from other cultures and countries, we hope for them to learn from and support each other and also to become more confident in their own faith and to learn to share it with others.
The idea of our project is to create a triangle of student exchanges between different groups of students from the partner schools. Each school will welcome a group from each of the partner schools in their country and also travel with two different groups to each one of the partner schools. We have specifically chosen a certain number of students from a certain class for each exchange based on the topic the students will be working on and on the methodology that will be used with regard to the curricula as well as competencies needed and to be achieved. For example, the Van Lodenstein College will send approximately 28 students from year 8 to Germany whereas the German students taking part in the exchange with the Netherlands are from year 9 because the Dutch students are taking part in the bilingual CLIL program and are ahead in speaking English. A content-related decision that we have made is, for instance, that the exchange between Lithuania and Germany will be done by older students from year 11 who have already covered relevant historical aspects of the modern era so that they will be able to dig deeper when working on repression and persecution during World War II and today.
All in all, the project will have around 100 participants traveling to one of the two partner schools in 6 exchange groups, where they will meet, communicate and work in workshops with approximately the same amount of students from the exchange school. The activities planned involve, for example, meeting with people from minority groups, visiting historical places, monuments and museums and being informed by experts. The idea is to provide an opportunity for the students to learn from and with each other about the topic of their project by learning about it together, discussing it and practically working on it in workshops. Each exchange group is supposed to come up with a presentable result of what they have worked on. This could be a presentation that they will show to other students, an article for the school magazine or website or encouraging video messages for persecuted Christians in other countries. In addition to the 6 mobilities planned, each exchange will be prepared and evaluated by teachers in project meetings and students via eTwinning. We are planning to use this platform to provide an opportunity for the students to get to know each other beforehand, to exchange information regarding the exchange and the project they will work on as well as to evaluate the project and stay in contact afterwards. We consider platforms like eTwinning an asset and an opportunity for partnerships and projects like ours since they enable us to reach our goal to meet, communicate and work despite long distances. However, personal and real-life experiences are of much more worth and since we consider them to be irreplaceable, we hope to receive the funding so that our students will not have to miss out on these unique and life-changing opportunities.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 74712 Eur

Project Coordinator

Van Lodenstein College Amersfoort & Country: NL

Project Partners

• August-Hermann-Francke-Gymnasium Detmold
• Vilnius Christian Gymnasium