Developing Emotional Intelligence through Common Activities, Charity and Voluntary Work Erasmus Project

Project Title

Developing Emotional Intelligence through Common Activities, Charity and Voluntary Work

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: Social/environmental responsibility of educational institutions; Civic engagement / responsible citizenship; Pedagogy and didactics

Project Summary

The highlight of our project idea is the belief that improving emotional intelligence should be an important part of our education at schools, but unfortunately it is sometimes neglected as there is not enough time for it within the usual teaching procedure. We believe, that common activities, charity and voluntary work are a powerful way of developing social and emotional learning in young people. Experience-based learning tools can provide a forum for the personal development of emotional intelligence in youngsters. The main objective of the project is to draw the attention of the students to the way how they can help people in need. The plan is to broaden consciousness and responsibility and to teach students how to organize charity events and participate in voluntary work, how to cooperate with local, even European help institutions, etc. Our desire is simply to encourage pupils to do some more volunteering and to cooperate in the same field with other youngsters from different countries, later perhaps at European level, too. It would be great and beneficial to exchange the experiences with other young active and sensitive people. We are curious how different institutions (helping the disabled, the elderly people, orphans the unemployed and the emigrants or doing voluntary work in the field of environmental protection) work in other countries. We emphasize the meaning of sharing our knowledge and setting a good example to the world around us. The plan is to introduce and fulfill a lot of activities which can support to reach our goals and involve in this work as many students and teachers as possible. It means that each partner school would like to involve about one hundred students and about fifteen teachers in the project work during the two years. All the four participating schools’ management and staff agree on the topic and the activity plan of the project. There are four partner schools and we are going to share the tasks equally so there will be four mobilities organized one by each partner school, and eight complex activities and tasks for students between the mobilities. Each partner school will be responsible for two tasks of this kind. All the activities and tasks will serve our main goal, improving emotional intelligence in students. They will include arts, musical and drama pedagogical activities, creating film reviews, learning about local and international charity organizations, finding great personalities in the field of charity and voluntary work, communication training, team building, conflict management, visiting social and health institutions, doing voluntary work for your school and for the environmental protection in the partner schools’ neighbourhood and organizing a charity fair. These very varied, common activities could ensure the success of the project work. At last but not least all the teams will give students and teachers the chance to broaden their knowledge about different cultural contexts. It is also important because today young people live their lives at a very quick pace getting information from a lot of sources.On the other hand, youngsters’ knowledge is frequently based on stereotypes.They don’t know how their peers from abroad live and that they have to face and solve the same problems. Before the mobilities, students and their parents, teachers will be prepared for these trips and by the time they arrive in the host country they will have had a lot of information about its culture, religion and people. Students are also going to be prepared for the activities they have to do during the meeting. At the end of the project students will hopefully understand that they are responsible for the people and the environment around them. They will be able to communicate better, manage conflicts, support people in need, participate in and organize charity events, do voluntary work. Our main project goal is to create knowledge which wouldn’t be forgotten after these two project years. We also hope that the social institutions involved in our project work will benefit from our activities, too. Working on the project the staff will improve the quality of teaching and learning as they will find new, interesting topics to deal with and find new methods to use during their lessons and furthermore in extracurricular activities and all these can be included in our new curricula. The project and its results will be promoted by the participating schools in their area, so the regional community centres, libraries, educational and cultural institutions can also benefit from this project. To reach this goal we will join the Erasmus Days events.We can offer to organize kinds of workshops and meetings in other institutions, too, so that they can make a good use of the results of the project.They could also try the new strategies and methods in their work. In this way the longer term benefits of the project could be ensured.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 130680 Eur

Project Coordinator

Budakeszi Nagy Sándor József Gimnázium & Country: HU

Project Partners

• Sarkisla Ismet Yilmaz Fen Lisesi
• I.S. ITN-ITG-IPS RIPOSTO
• Liceul Pedagogic Bod Peter