Creating a living environment for domestic animals in urban and rural areas Erasmus Project

Project Title

Creating a living environment for domestic animals in urban and rural areas

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: Rural development and urbanisation; Environment and climate change; Social/environmental responsibility of educational institutions

Project Summary

The Else-Hirsch-Schule is a school for children and teenagers with special needs in learning in Bochum, in the middle of an urban agglomeration. It is attended by students, who require a variety of support in cognitive, motoric, emotional and social aspects and their perception.
Due to our way of life and the increasing expansion of human living space and the development of infrastructure, native wild animals are increasingly losing their natural habitat. This makes clear that we as humans must find a sensible way of dealing with the environment in our immediate surroundings. Nature and animals increasingly need the support of humans in order to find food and sleeping places in cities, for example, which correspond as far as possible to their natural living
conditions. Both urban and rural areas today present animals with new problems. School has the task of informing students about this problem, teaching them about environmental protection and nature conservation, showing them alternative courses of action and strengthening their personal sense of responsibility.
It is an important task for us as a school to prepare students with learning disabilities to consciously and largely independently manage their lives in family and leisure time, in society and state, in the world of work and occupation, in nature and the environment.
This importance of environmental protection and the responsibility towards the animal and plant world is very important to us in our pedagogical work.
Our school, the Else-Hirsch-Schule, is located in the middle of one of the largest urban areas in Europe. Our schoolyard is an example of a man-made place where plants and animals do not find a suitable space. This phenomenon can be observed plentiful in our district or city. By participating in the Erasmus project, we as a school would like to carry out various activities/ projects in our schoolyard, in the school environment and in our district and give native animals a habitat again.
All students of the school, which includes grades 1-10, take part in the project. During the quarterly project weeks, the pupils expand their skills by increasing their knowledge of the native flora and fauna. This knowledge and the resulting change in thinking is to be brought closer to people and especially to other pupils through information boxes and a touring exhibition at different locations in the district.
This work serves as a basis for our practical activities, i.e. planning and building bat boxes, squirrel dreys, hedgehog houses, boxes for bees and insect hotels. These project results will be placed on the redesigned schoolyard of our school, as well as on the schoolyards of other schools in our city and other places in our district.
Within the upper classes of our school (grades 8-10) we introduce Erasmus lessons. This is where the contents of the project, a part of the practical work of producing the project results, the search for project partners, as well as the installation and further care and maintenance of the results will take place.
The short-term visits to the project partners will also be carried out with pupils of the upper classes, as we consider the age group to be appropriate to take on the learning aspects of an international exchange and thus initiate further development processes in the students.
The partnership with our project partner, the Reformpädagogisches Oberstufengymnasium Steyr, is very well suited to show our students that a more conscious approach to our environment does not only have to take place in familiar, urban spaces. Here, during the exchange, our pupils can experience in practice that environmental protection is an important part of preserving native flora and fauna, even in more rural, unspoilt areas. We have already started with a lively exchange of project ideas and their realization.
We hope that the Erasmus project will help us to create new habitats for wild animals in our immediate school environment as well as in the wider surroundings of our school and that it will initiate or develop a progressive awareness of our environment among our students and local project partners. This is a new and particularly important task for education, especially in times of climate change.
We, as a school for children with special needs in learning, distinguish ourselves through our multiculturalism. We are happy to share our knowledge and products with our partner school in Austria. This project underlines the European idea and, through the partnership with the school in Austria, helps to reduce possible prejudices and to awaken the interest of our students in the European idea of a common world.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 38254 Eur

Project Coordinator

Else-Hirsch-Schule & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Reformpaedagogisches Oberstufenrealgymnasium des Evangelischen Vereins für ganzheitliches Lernen Steyr