Europe, our Shared Home: Regional identities in a common history Erasmus Project

Project Title

Europe, our Shared Home: Regional identities in a common history

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 : Strategic Partnerships for Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Migrants’ issues; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Early School Leaving / combating failure in education

Project Summary

At the end of our two-year project, our partnership is proud to acknowledge how far we’ve reached and how much we have accomplished in our journey together.
We set out to help build a new narrative for Europe with very different schools around our continent. We come from very different contexts : two partner schools work as a boarding school and have special needs students, one partner is an experimental high school and one partner is a public primary and high school with an integration class for students with special needs. We have different social backgrounds and problems, we have different approaches to educational goals and we all have very different pupils. However, we found out we could get along very well together and produce outstanding work in very different formats. We’ve established a strong and effective communication system, with several online meetings, meeting protocols, and time-management tools, all of them thoroughly and consistently used throughout the project.
At the first TPM in France, we designed what we believed were the best strategies to implement our project. We assigned each of the four main cluster themes to each partner school and we mapped the World Heritage assets we could mobilize for this project. Each school creatively approached its cluster theme and in every TTLA our students got successively familiarized with Migrations, World War II, Discoveries, and Democracy and Liberty. Plus, all our students produced a lot of research on each of the clusters and learned how to use a wide range of learning tools from drama plays to online apps. They came to realize how the same concept can have different historical approaches depending on the country, being notwithstanding part of the same European history. Our students also got in contact with several landmarks in Western Civilization, from the Acropolis to Auschwitz, which they would not know otherwise. By getting exposed to this kind of subjects, from different perspectives, we believe our students (some of which have never left their hometown) developed a sharper sense of European citizenship.
Furthermore, our students developed a diverse set of competencies, from communication, teamwork and cooperation, critical thinking and creativity, thus adding new skills to school curricula as recommended by up-to-date educational research.
The sound results from this project can be used to measure its success: we have produced a multinational poetry book, an international website, an eTwinning page, several online quizzes using interactive and appealing new apps (Kahoot, Socrative, etc), several exhibitions at all partner schools, dissemination events in each partner school on Europe Day, International Meetings with national authorities in two different countries (Portugal and Poland) and an extensive ensemble of artwork, from drawings, to graffities, drama play, short movies and posters.
All the schools in the partnership agreed in carrying this partnership into the future. A new Erasmus+ project was submitted for the 2018-2020 period and is currently pending approval.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 118481,91 Eur

Project Coordinator

EREA de Rennes & Country: FR

Project Partners

• 2nd Peiramatiko Gymnasio Athinon
• EBI Francisco Ferreira Drummond
• Mlodziezowy Osrodek Wychowawczy