Cultural Ambassadors Erasmus Project

Project Title

Cultural Ambassadors

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 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Open and distance learning

Project Summary

The notion of “European citizen“, despite its wide array of uses in the educational curriculum, is actually perceived as abstract, far, distant and unknown by today’s adolescents. Even though the curriculum deals with the path which has led to the European Union, with the philosophical ideas which moulded the Union, or with the importance of international cooperation, today’s adolescents are not aware of which were their national currencies before the Euro, they realized they were crossing a national border just because of the additional cost of the Roaming. The European Year of Cultural Heritage seems to be the proper time to remember the path which has led to the notion of “European citizen“, to examine the elements which fill this definition and, above all, to analyse the advantages that this Heritage can still offer nowadays.
This project aims to allow a deeper understanding of how the different forms of European Cultural Heritage not only represent our history, but they can be an added value for our economies and European identity. The participants are to be turned into “young cultural ambassadors“ of some elements of the Cultural Heritage of the partner country, thus becoming cultural diffusers.
Twenty-five students per each partner will be included in the project. The pupils are between 15-16 and are in the middle of their Second Education path for the Italian partner and in their second-last year for the Basque partner.
The students involved will firstly analyse possible definitions of European Cultural Heritage and will focus on some elements of the Tangible and Intangible European Heritage. Among others, they will focus on art as an economic resource, the local entrepreneurial fabric, the socio-economic factors of Veneto and the Pays Basque, bilingualism as an added value, etc.
The participants, divided into different groups and with the supervision of teachers from different departments, will gather material and will carry out a research in order to organize mini-conferences.
These conferences will be organised in two stages, before and after the international mobility week. The former will be possible thanks to the work realized before the mobility week and will provide information to the partner’s peers before their visit. The latter mini-conferences will be organised after the mobility week and will rely on the first-hand experience lived. During the mobility week, the two partners will organize activities focusing on some elements of the Cultural Heritage, mutually established before the beginning of the project. The Basque school will focus on the bilingual society and what it brings along, both from a cultural and an economic point of view. Therefore, it will organise workshops on the Euskara language, the History and Economy of the Pays Basque, a visit of the Basque Language Centre and a talk with a member of the Basque Parliament, as well as a possible visit of the Parliament. The Italian partner will focus on the entrepreneurial fabric of the area, as well as art as an economic leading factor. There will be workshops on Internationalization, a visit to the Scrovegni Chapel, along with a talk with the Direction, a visit to the Special Agency for Internationalization of the Chamber of Commerce and a talk with some students of the American University in Padua.
The activities aim to awake a “researching feeling“ among the participants, giving them the chance to compare the perspective of the cultural elements they elaborated listening to their peers in the first stage with their first-hand experience during the mobility week. The physical exchange will be an added value to discover what is perceived as “unconnected-foreign“. The stay in families will give the opportunity to discover some additional elements of the Cultural Heritage, as the households play a key role in a community and its values. All the international projects carried out by the two partners allowed to obtain some long-term results. The elaboration of good practices, the comparison between school and evaluating systems, language improvement, new personal relationships, the discovery of new realities. Since the project aims to offer participants a first-hand experience and a more concrete definition of Europe and its heritage, the final mini-conferences for the educational and local community are believed to be the key factor to evaluate the results. They will also be the proper time to match the “on-line“ and “physical“ work the participants will have been working on throughout the school year; it will allow to observe the importance of a peer-to-peer collaboration to design a final practical product which is meant to be spread beyond the local school community.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 24546 Eur

Project Coordinator

Istituto Femminile Don Bosco delle Figlie di Maria Ausiliatrice & Country: IT

Project Partners

• IES Azkoitia BHI