From raw material to final product: A contribution to the curriculum development Erasmus Project

Project Title

From raw material to final product: A contribution to the curriculum development

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 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Labour market issues incl. career guidance / youth unemployment

Project Summary

Sustainable designs of processes are becoming more and more important for our economy. Our project has been evoked by increasing commodity prices, shortage of resources and limitation of economy growth. We have learned that science and industry concentrate their focus within research, development and production on issues like “Sustainable Development” and “Responsible Care”. These issues concern core subjects like Biology, Chemistry, Food Processing and IT.
This Creative Process project has to be understood as a practical example according to the above mentioned principles. Students gained skills for their vocational life and in deed for their orientation in life itself.
How important these principles are was experienced by our pupils especially in the workshops, which were partly hosted in and led by experts from local businesses, and operational explorations which were fixed part of each mobility schedule in each country.
Thus it was an added value that pupils learned vocational skills and competences by doing real practice in workshops with professionals. Of course all skills developed are important for employability, entrepreneurship, vocational training and professional development.
Proof for all this is our teaching sequence “From raw material to final product in general” to be found on our blog.
The single mobilities were well-planned by the hosting schools and a thorough preparation of regional production processes and products resulted in profound presentations of these example products on so called “market places”, where the pupils could witness varieties of as well as similarities and differences in such production processes compared to the other countries.
The objectives of the project were reached. In fact this project explained all participants the ways in which familiar objects are manufactured, and the people, ideas and technology used to transform raw materials into finished products. The project asked students to research and design a product, identifying the type of raw materials used, considering sustainable design and investigating production processes as well as showing their understanding of environmental issues. This project brought the manufacturing experience to life through Hands-on activities, Role-playing opportunities, Live-demonstrations. The students created work processes for production of products within the science and technical lessons: Foods (“From cocoa bean to chocolate (Black Forest Cake)”), Beverages (“From grape to wine”) and technical devices (”From pure plaster to ornate plastering”).
These issues concerned core subjects like Science, Food Processing and IT, and many lessons were held in English by using CLIL methodology.
Our students improved their English knowledge as an important part of the intercultural competences and used it through their active participation in project activities all held in English, vehicular language of the project.
The main focus of the project was developing vocational skills, designing bilingual lessons (CLIL) that could be taught in all participating schools. The bilingual lessons were uploaded on the blog http://www.nkoteb.com/
In addition to the bilingual lessons we created a guide line (pattern of skills) for vocational competences for professional training for secondary schools. Also uploaded on the blog.
This guideline was created according to the results of interviews with involved teachers of all partner schools, local stakeholders and representatives of recruitment agencies.
As concerns documentation and dissemination we reconsidered the idea of producing a paper manual and replaced in the course of the project by the decision to set up a blog for better dissemination possibilities. A blog is accessible for a much wider group of people nowadays including interested pupils, teachers, schools, national agencies or even companies all around the world.
Furthermore a blog is very flexible and people working at the same topic can add more material (teaching units, worksheets…) to be included in further work with the topic.
In this respect we rather created some sort of digital handbook – the blog – as a flexible and expandable alternative to the paper version, which we plan to maintain and work with in the future.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 131095 Eur

Project Coordinator

Theodor-Frank-Realschule Teningen & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Istituto Professionale Statale per i Servizi Socio Sanitari De Lilla Bari
• GYMNASIUM OF ERETRIA
• Lahden yhteiskoulun säätiö
• Garðaskóli
• Institut Màrius Torres