Ethos of Europe – Acting for Integration Erasmus Project

Project Title

Ethos of Europe – Acting for Integration

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: Integration of refugees; Social dialogue; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

In the recent years, a lot of people with different religions, cultures and social situations tried to enter the European Union to escape military conflicts or persecution. These developments have led to fears among many regarding their own political and social future, resulting in an increase in nationalism, populism and the tendency to create mental and physical borders all over Europe. The European Union had been created to unite and integrate people with various religious, cultural or social backgrounds. The given project „Ethos of Europe – Acting for integration“ tried to revive this concept among young European citizens by bringing them together and letting them create and express their personal ideas of integration and European culture.
Students from Italy, Spain, Lithuania, Portugal, Austria and Germany had already worked together in a previous project called „Sound of Europe – we are making radio “. The students took part with a lot of motivation and were very interested to contribute to the project work. In this project, 24-30 students from all countries would participate in project meetings, which all partner schools would host. They were accompanied by teachers of the respective schools, who moderated and evaluated the project work. During their visits there were also cultural and social events in order to facilitate a sense of community and to get to know the habits and traditions of each country.
But beyond thatthe project opened the way to reach more people with the ideas and outcomes of this common work. Students became more open-minded, were able to work in international groups in another language than their mother tongue and were happy to create something very new to share with others. With different tools we created new interesting ways of learning for our students: acquiring skills like e.g. writing poems/short stories, making short (documentary) movies, acting scenes, creating photo exhibitions and other artistic expressions. They were integrated in any part of project managing like looking for partners, working together on workshops and create their own products. Knowledge of different tools/techniques like editing, rehearsing, writing and acting were established. With this the students received a lot of possible benefits such as becoming more open-minded citizens, acquiring diversity management abilities, intercultural competences mixed with digital and artistic competences and/or other benefits of creating products as a means of an alternative instrument for learning.
Teachers learned about the transnational aspect of teaching and learning, had the opportunity to improve their English and their capacity to work in teams. Schools could offer more international aspects to parents and pupils. The evaluation and dissemination of the project results to the other participants were realized through virtual platforms such as Twinspace and social media, so local authorities could benefit from the outcomes of the project and use it for social, cultural and youth policy objects.
However, the Corona Pandemic in early 2020 led to a prolonged hiatus. The mobilities in Naples and Valencia were cancelled, and at that time it was not clear how and if the project could be brought to a satisfying conclusion. Since the project was supposed to end at the end of August 2020, it was prolonged by the national agencies to make the two remaining project activities possible. In March and May 2021 we were able to do these project ways virtually, hosted by the Italian school in Naples and the Spanish school in Valencia respectively. This was something that only few people in the project had experience with, but the results and the reactions by all participants showed that these two activities were a great success, given the circumstances. In general it can be summarized that, even though there were some huge obstacles along the way, the project as a whole can be considered a great success.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 147371,64 Eur

Project Coordinator

Private Tagesheim-und Internatsschule Dieburg & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Lazdiju Motiejaus Gustaicio gimnazija
• BRG Schloss Wagrain
• Agrupamento de Escolas de Ferreira do Zêzere
• IES BENICALAP
• ITG DELLA PORTA-PORZIO