Developing citizenship, getting an opening to Europe, meeting each other and work together Erasmus Project

Project Title

Developing citizenship, getting an opening to Europe, meeting each other and work together

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: Cultural heritage/European Year of Cultural Heritage; Teaching and learning of foreign languages; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

In 2018, Irish teachers visiting North Cotentin in Normandy met French colleagues to talk about possible partnerships. They immediatly agreed on the fact that their territories had much in common, were geographically close and yet, people from each country didn’t know each other and had no idea of what the neighbourg ‘s territory looked like. Most of students from Roscommon County and from Dublin, as well as the students from Cherbourg, had never crossed the Channel to visit their closest European neighbourgs.

The Erasmus + project is based on this first encounter, this shared point of view and the common needs of the 5 schools in contact :
– the real necessity to provide a window on the World to students with less opportunities and to make them share a European culture and citizenship, while Europe has to deal with a serious Identity crisis.
– the need to enable students to communicate with others, using a foreign language in an authentic intercultural situation, which is rarely the case in classes.
– the schools ‘ ambition to create long-term European partnerships and to develop their international opening and their cooperation with local partners.

The schools have organised activities based on the common identified needs descripted above and on the local ressources they can rely on. these activities aim at :
1. Building a European citizenship for students who never or rarely go abroad and for whom Europe remains an abstract concept. The students will explore their territory and local heritage to promote it to their European classmates. They will also discover the partner’s territory and heritage, exchange about differences and similitudes and figure out their position in Europe.
Thanks to documentary researches, field visits, exchanges on eTwinning, and debates organized through visioconferences, students will develop a European friendship while sharing a common culture out of misrepresentations and reinforcing the sense of belonging to the same Europe.The welcoming and the discovery trails organised on the territority by the students for their schoolmates will eventually strengthen the links between students and develop reciprocal knwoledge of their heritage. The collective creation of an interactive travel guide in French and English by students for young people will enable them to learn how to work together, to defend their point of view, to put in common their ideas and thus to live a true experience of international cooperation . The participation of local authorities and parents in these actions will also bring the learning process out of the class.

2. Developing foreign langage practice in genuine moments of communication thanks to every activity based on exchanges of information, informal discussions on the e-Twinning forum, regular visioconferences and the creation of a bilingual travel guide. As many subjects and teachers are involved (history, arts, cinema, littérature, géography, sciences, langages), the teachers will have to work with the partner’s language despite they are not language teachers. The aim is to show students that languages are not only school subjects but on the contrary, tools to communicate and work together.

3. Strenghtening the new relationships between the 5 schools in order to create official pairings between them and develop new projects (lengthy, instructive immersion in the partner’s school for students , regular exchanges on pedagogical issues for teachers, new Erasmus + project including longer training session abroad for students…). Because we want these links to last and to exist outside the classrooms, the activities of the project have been organised to favor a true knowledge of the partner, of his heritage, his way of life, of the differences and the similarities between the local inhabitants.

4. Learning how to work with partners from different professional environments : the participation of local authorities, of cultural associations, of Non-Formal Education will help students to make links between academic kwnoledge and social abilities and encourage teachers to improve their professional practices.

The project will contribute to a lasting European friendship between students and a strong sense of belonging to the same European Community. The students are expected to improve their social abilities and their fluency in a foreign language. Il will also be an opportunity for teachers to work differently thanks to the involvment of the parents and other professionals into the project (city halls, tourism boards, cultural associations etc..) to contribute to the sucess of the students and the schools.
Thanks to the dynamic created by the project, the schools will be able to enlarge their international openess through new actions and thus participate to the goals of our education system concerning mobility for young people.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 21500 Eur

Project Coordinator

LYCEE GENERAL ET TECHNOLOGIQUE JEAN-FRANCOIS MILLET & Country: FR

Project Partners

• Méanscoil Muire gan Smál
• Lycée Alexis de Tocqueville
• St Mary’s Secondary School Baldoyle
• CBS Roscommon