European youth revisiting the Grand Tour Erasmus Project

Project Title

European youth revisiting the Grand Tour

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: Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Cultural heritage/European Year of Cultural Heritage; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

Our aim, through this project, was to get our students to envision their neighborhoods in multiple ways, to help them take a different look at the places where they live as well as to understand them differently.
For many of our students, living in a big city does not mean having access to its cultural, architectural or historical richness; for many of them, the neighborhoods in which they live are isolated places, which they find difficult to see as open to the rest of the world.
For the most part, these are multicultural neighborhoods which, paradoxically, are also places where a form of communitarianism is strong.
Our goal was to “show” young Europeans, through the discovery of each of the partner cities, the diversity of the human and cultural wealth of Europe.

Our students are not used to overstepping the boundaries of their neighborhoods.
The project allowed them to do this in several ways:

– Visit new neighborhoods:(physically or virtually): Neukölln in Berlin, via Merope in Rome, La Chapelle in Paris do not correspond to the classic representations that we have of the cities where these neighborhoods are located

– Question the identity of these neighborhoods by designing guides for their peers and becoming ambassadors of the places; highlight the assets of these neighborhoods and the richness of their diversity, better understand the places by showing them to others.

– Discover their cities and other cities in Europe and thus broaden their cultural horizons and see the city in which they live with new eyes.

We had planned a meeting of all the participating establishments in each of the European cities.
10 to 12 students per school were supposed to participate in each trip and many classes were to be involved in the planned activities.
Among the 5 student mobilities initially planned, only 3 actually took place. The original idea was for each school to create their own city guide, and then we were to group the guides together under the name “Grand Tour Guides”.
The project was going as planned until early 2020. Three student mobility (Paris, Seville and Berlin) and one teacher mobility (Paris) happened.
From March 2020, all the schools participating in the project had to close their doors; all our students gathered at their homes and the projects that had been launched were put on hold. Even upon returning to class in France, the restrictions linked to the health protocol made it difficult to continue working on the project with the students: mobilities canceled (Rome and Paris), workshops in groups of students suspended, school outings impossible. .
In addition, communication with European partners was made difficult due to the context (closure of schools, lack of information on the availability of each other, discouragement in the face of the situation, etc.). The realization of the activities of the final part of the project was thus made complicated or even impossible due to the health context; the context of the pandemic significantly impeded final achievements, several adaptations had to be made to reach some sort of a closure to the project, but our work, which had to be re-focused on very restricted areas around the schools was deprived of the European dimension which was at the very core of the reflexion.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 148896,72 Eur

Project Coordinator

Collège Aimé Césaire & Country: FR

Project Partners

• Ecole élémentaire publique Pajol
• CEIP MARIE CURIE
• Ecole17Tanger
• Gemeinschaftsschule auf dem Campus Rütli
• Istituto Comprensivo “Via Merope”