Constructing European identity through material and intangible heritage Erasmus Project

Project Title

Constructing European identity through material and intangible heritage

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 : Strategic Partnerships for Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Teaching and learning of foreign languages; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Pedagogy and didactics

Project Summary

This project has been focused on knowing and learning about the European industrial heritagem but we learnt that heritage was much more than physical old sites, and had to do with everything that every country recognizes as own; therefore, we began to work with a broader meaning of “industrial”, not only material remains, also intangible topics. Cultural issues as legends, food, music and dances have finally become a core part of our project.
When we began to design our project our idea was to give it a high rank referring to core competences and skills, paying special attention to items that we guess are critical for the 21st century: teamwork, languages and ICT tools. We defined the approaches to the general topic of heritage from the point of view of a school community placed within a difficult background, with many of our students and families experiencing economic and social troubles; Institute Enric Borràs, the coordinator school is actually catalogued as a “maximum complexity school” by educational Catalan authorities, and we guess that, to overcome and revert this situation our students deserved the opportunity to work in a European project and to improve the skills referred earlier, to give them better school and career opportunities.

The project began to be implemented and soon after we received the bad news that one of our partners, Knox Academy, in Scotland, had dropped out; fortunately, we manage to reorganise the schedule and, finally, we could, at least, implement all the funded activities.

The other schools, that finally remained in the project came from the South(3) and East (1) of Europe: 4th Gymnasium Komotinis, in Thrace, Greece; Suleyman Demirel Anadolu Lisesi, Dortyol, Turkey, Zespol Szkol Noewj Slupi, Gimnazjum nº 1, Poland and Institute Telesi@, Telei Termine, Benevento, Italy. The schools came from different backgrounds, but, generally speaking, we can say that most of our students belonged to medium-low working class from medium size villages and cities

The activities were distributed along the two years project and were presented to other schools during the two international meetings held in Badalona and Komotini. The main activities were:
Video presentation of every school and village
Design and election of a logo
Research about local heritage: images, textual sources
Design of local heritage itineraries using GIS tools
Presentation about local heritage and traditions with ITC tools
Video recording of a traditional recipe
Furthermore, there was a special programme for both students’ interchanges:
Visit to local heritage (Spain and Greece)
Workshops (Spain and Greece)
Visit to local institutions (Spain and Greece)
Local cuisine workshop (Spain and Greece)
At the very beginning of the project there was a launching meeting in Badalona to discuss and design the schedule of the project. Some activities were held:
Workshop on GIS
Visit to industrial heritage (Badalona, Barcelona)

Most of these activities were developed by every partner, and can be checked in the project web. The language of communication was always English but vernacular languages were also present in some of the activities, as a sample of European diversity. Some of the partners decided to present their activities using other formats.

We believe that in spite of the fact that the project finished by end of August 2018, we won’t be able to understand the impact of the project till some time has happened. The results are also a bit difficult to measure, especially when some of them are intangible. Our school in Badalona has among their goals every year the increasing of the cohesion and the projection to the neighbourhood. Undoubtedly, this goal has been accomplished as the feeling of belonging to the school and the interest in European projects have also increased. From a narrower approach we believe that the main impact in our school has to do with the interest in learning English. Many of our students need to improve their English skills. The European project has been a tool to show how useful is English and last two years we’ve been able to develop some extra activities to improve the competence in foreign language of our students.

On the other side, the results of the project are published in our web. We are not completely happy as finally we couldn’t manage to develop an App on GIS, and it’s a pending issue to think over in the future. Institut Enric Borras has also begun recently to find out about PBL and it could be a good way to took up this subject.

We are already experiencing benefits from the experience, as we described earlier, referring to the interest of the school, management, students and teachers in CLIL and PBL methodology, both experienced within the Erasmus+ Project just finished. We guess that English improvement will be a fact and that nearest external assessment exams, national and international will reflect it, but it’s a bit too soon to already arrive to conclusions.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 81410 Eur

Project Coordinator

INS Enric Borràs & Country: ES

Project Partners

• 4o Gymnasio Komotinis
• SULEYMAN DEMIREL ANADOLU LISESI
• Knox Academy
• Zespol Szkol w Nowej Slupi – Publiczne Gimnazjum nr 1 im. Bl.ks.B.Markiewicza
• istituto d’istruzione superiore telesi@