Glück – Suerte – Felicidad – Fortuna – An intercultural investigation Erasmus Project

Project Title

Glück – Suerte – Felicidad – Fortuna – An intercultural investigation

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 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Ethics, religion and philosophy (incl. Inter-religious dialogue)

Project Summary

“Glück” – “Happiness” – “Joy” – “Felicity” – who does not strive for it? Irrespective of origin, age, time – everybody wants to be happy, sometimes more and sometimes less consciously. But, what do we actually mean by “happiness”?
In youth, which is fundamentally coined by teenagers’ search for their identity, the question of “happiness” opens up for the first time in a person’s life. Apart from that, students all over Europe are currently experiencing first-hand a global crisis whose long-term consequences for our societies and for Europe as a whole cannot be predicted yet. In this acute crisis situation, the questions of what “good life” means and what we understand to be our common values in society open up again. For in the end, basing your life upon your core values helps to tackle crises. Agreeing on and promoting common values will be of critical importance for the future of Europe, and young people play a crucial part in that. Our project has therefore gained an unforeseen topicality. Therefore, if in Europe, we understand school as a place in which we do not only trasmit and learn knowledge, but in which we lay the foundation for a successful life, we need to place the question of happiness into the centre of our work. This is where our project sets off.
In a group of 20 German and 20 Spanish 10th-grade students and four teachers, we will address the question of happiness from an intercultural and intergenerational perspective. As the product of our project, we will bundle our findings in a radio feature.
As the first step, the students will reflect individually what “happiness” means for them, and they will then compare their concepts with those of their classmates in order to find out what “happiness” means for people of their home culture. The students’ task will be to agree on images which, according to them, best represent the concept of “happiness” in their culture.
The fact that “Glück” is not easily translatable into other languages adds to the difficulty of this step. In Spanish, “Glück” has a variety of possible translations: “suerte”, “felicidad” or “alegría”. How will the Spanish students define these terms and which images will they choose for each of them? In our first project meeting in Granada, both sides will have to present their images and justify their selection. In multicultural groups, the students will analyse similarities and differences with respect to the concept of “happiness” in Germany and Spain. On top of that, we will also focus on the question of individual, cultural and European values in our first meeting. Methodologically, we will use activities which have been developed for the German “Schulfach Glück” (“School subject “Happiness”). Based on our insight gained so far, the students will develop a photo exhibition, which will be displayed in both participating schools. After our first meeting, we will broaden our topic with respect to the question to what extent there are differences in the concepts of happiness between different generations. In order to investigage this, the students will design interview questions and carry out interviews with people from different generations, i.e. classmates, parents and grandparents. They will then evaluate these interviews and prepare presentations about their results for our second project meeting in Ravensburg. Our focus for this meeting will be whether the differences in what “Glück” means to different people are bigger on an intergenerational than on an intercultural level. As our final step, the participating students will design and record radio features in smaller, intercultural groups. These will summarise the results of our project and will serve to disseminate them via our school radios and, if possible, local radio stations. Thereby, we wish to encourage other people to think about what “happiness” means to them, too.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 44808 Eur

Project Coordinator

Bildungszentrum St. Konrad Gymnasium & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Instituto de Enseñanza Secundaria “La Madraza”