Europe – old roots, new stories Erasmus Project

Project Title

Europe – old roots, new stories

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: Teaching and learning of foreign languages; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

Those who have no memory of the past cannot build the future. When European identity and the very reasons for the birth of the European Union are challenged by anti-Europe populism, reaching back to the common roots of our history can only increase the awareness of our shared values. We expect that our students, studying Roman findings in Badalona, as well as near Andria and Wertingen, can reflect on how “small Europe is” and how surprisingly coherent its history is. We trust that seeing the Danube flow near Wertingen and through Hungary, students will find out how important that “limes” was and what it has meant, for so many peoples of “barbaric” origin, to overcome it.
In the project, four European grammar schools will work together: Gymnasium Wertingen, Germany, Liceo Scientifico „R.Nuzzi“ Andria, Italy, Celldömölki Berzsenyi Dániel Gimnázium, Hungary, and Garbi Pere Vergés Badalona, Spain. When choosing the project partners we paid attention to the fact that the countries have different traditions as well as to the origin of their mother tongues: Roman, in the case of the Spanish and Italian students, Germanic, for German students and Finno-Ugric, for Hungarians. This shall ensure a comprehensive picture of our European roots. We settled on choosing 14 to 16 year old students as they will be old enough to grasp this kaleidoscopic subject area and its importance for our modern times.
Besides sharpening their historic-cultural awareness, this project will also increase students’ intercultural communicative competence and language skills since they have to work together with peers from three different European countries online and offline during our learning activities while using a language foreign to them all. In order to promote students’ ITC skills, an Internet-based project room on the eTwinning platform will be set up which will be of great use during our project weeks where students have to collaborate via the internet. This room will serve for communication and cooperation purposes among the participants as well as for the collection of materials developed during the project. That way, our students can gain important experiences for their future professional lives. The work with this project room will also provide the participating teachers with an insight into a different teaching method. During the period of the project four major topics encompassing history, languages, the fine arts and literature as well as impacts on present day and future developments will be discussed and their importance for our times evaluated. The students will research in all subject areas in their own countries and together during learning activities. They will formulate their results in English. During the learning activities, these results will be revised in transnational work groups and a final version will be developed. In the course of the project, a collection of materials will result from that work. As nationalist tendencies trigger movements to cut off individual countries, it is all the more important to focus on our common European roots and to get to know and visit our neighbours to generate a unifying force among our young people.
At the end, the results will be available online even after the end of the project as OER. Here, the information of our findings and analyses in the various research fields will be included together with tutorials and stop-motion-videos presenting the most important facts and findings in a modern format which the younger generation finds easy to relate to. In order to include many points of view concerning our Erasmus+ project, we also intend to generate a web-based diary which will also be made available on twinspace. Here, we want to start e-friendships between the hosting and participating families to strengthen pan-European ties.
In the long term, the project will help our students to understand that personal research is absolutely necessary for an informed opinion and that the results may well differ from presentations in the media. Due to the project, contacts among the schools will be intensified.
As to the teachers: The experiences with the project help them to initiate and supervise such projects in the future. They will use their knowledge to develop new online teaching units on their own and continue to promote the European idea at their schools.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 100496 Eur

Project Coordinator

Gymnasium Wertingen & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Liceo scientifico statale “R.Nuzzi” Andria
• Celldömölki Berzsenyi Dániel Gimnázium
• Fundació Escoles Garbí