Intercultural exchange between Germany and Romania Erasmus Project

Project Title

Intercultural exchange between Germany and Romania

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: EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy; Inclusion – equity; Disabilities – special needs

Project Summary

The students of Nibelungen-Secondary School have had inclusive experiences within the school with students with ADHD, ADS, learning disabilities or language problems (refugees, migrants) as well as with students with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Through the encounter with the students of our Romanian partner school, they were able to gain new experiences with students with hearing impairments, hearing implants or hearing loss. Video telephony and specially produced sign language tutorials were used to help the students communicate with each other. The students of the partner school recorded small films with signs to be used daily. We were able to learn from these films. We used these signs digitally as well as during the encounters again and again and also used them in the school mentoring club. In addition to sign language, we also communicated with visual support using picture cards, for example when shopping for groceries in the city. This was shown to us by the Romanian students during their visit to Sibiu. We also danced with both groups of students. How do you succeed in dancing together when you can’t hear the music? Here, attentive recording and mirroring of movement sequences helps. We also practised this together. We learned that the low frequencies of the bass are transmitted well to the legs via the swing dance floor. Other skills were reading from the mouth and also speaking slowly and loudly to the teachers with great facial expressions and gestures. For further communication, English, Romanian and body language were used as well as translation programmes on mobile phones. Through the great warmth of our Romanian host students as well as the teachers, the students have made friends. Using modern media and social media, the students are still connected until today and write each other or chat. Both our German students and their parents succeeded in gaining a realistic picture of the country of Romania, its beliefs, nature, people and culture. This came about through the continuous, weekly work in the school sponsorship group and parents’ evenings before and after the trip as well as through the trip itself. In the workshop, we dealt with the history of Romania, the denominational diversity in the country, especially the Romanian Orthodox Church. The history and special features of Transylvania, especially with the traditions of the minorities, were also special topics of study. We learned one Romanian, one Hungarian and one Romany dance each (see the attached presentation). Through the trip to Romania, visits there both in the city and in the village and a ride on a horse-drawn cart, they were able to gain an insight into everyday life in the city and in the countryside. They got to know representatives of the Hungarian and German minorities through the students and teachers of the partner school. Through the Elijah project, they gained insight into the life of the Roma minority. In the village of Hozman/Holzmengen, where the project has its headquarters, almost exclusively Roma live today. This Christian education project builds on the resources of Roma culture, for example musicality. All children receive early musical education and further support until they are 18 years old. The association provides the instruments and the professionals as well as meeting rooms. They are taught by Roma musicians and music teachers and receive homework help. Courses in beat boxing or rapping in Romanian, Romani and English have been initiated. The mothers receive home economics training. Agricultural training and affordable work for Roma youth and adults are possible as a result. Roma bands are hired for festivities. In all our encounters we have been struck by the great warmth, the firm faith and the hospitality of the people. But also the beautiful landscape, the nature, the mountains have inspired us. The theatre education work remained a central component of the joint encounter. In Sibiu 2019, the focus was on working with neutral masks. In mask work, facial expressions are no longer used as a means of communication, but gestures and physical expression become all the more important. Exaggerations make the situation vivid and clear. Working with contrasting emotions, creating small scenes with pupils from both schools and street theatre in Romania were learning activities. The highlight was the performance of all students on the grounds of the castle in Alba Iulia with the involvement of the spontaneous audience (see the attached presentation). The theatre festival in Sibiu took place during the exam period for the Romanian students, so we had to move the trip forward one week and could not participate in the festival. This was a pity, but organisationally necessary. The Corona pandemic shattered our plans for the two mobilities C2 and C4. Therefore, these took place digitally. Both schools took part digitally in the inclusive theatre festival called “Klatschmohn” (2021) with the play “The Rainbow Fish”. For this, we had already made preliminary arrangements in Romania and created materials in both languages. The mobilities were compensated by two digital pupil weeks and a digital teacher training. We conducted these via Iserv video conferences. The coordination of the overall project was and still is with Mrs Simone Weiss (social pedagogue). The starting teacher for English and the school management have changed. Mr Otto, an English teacher, supports us linguistically and actively in our project and was actively involved in the mobility C1 to RO. Since students from all grades participated in the workshop, it did not make sense to integrate it into the English lessons of only one grade. We limited communication via email, social media and video conferencing to the club. During the pandemic, we also had to pay attention to cohort regulations. We carried out the project consistently by means of a school mentoring group/club in the afternoon once a week with two school hours. During the entire project period 20 girls between the ages of 12 and 18 participated actively. Other teachers from the Nibelungen-Secondary School supported us with teacher mobility C3 when our Romanian colleagues visited us. Among other things, they were able to observe music and art lessons as well as English lessons. Another teacher has joined us and with it another focus: environmental education. It is our teacher for biology and chemistry: Mr Kraeher. He works one day at the extracurricular learning site, the Regional Environmental Centre at the Dowesee. The Nibelungen-Secondary School is the oldest environmental school in Lower Saxony. Through the C3 mobility, the visit of Romanian teachers to our environmental school and the Dowesee Regional Environmental Centre, we have included the focus of environmental education in our Romania-Germany exchange, in addition to our theatre education work. Due to the pandemic, we have changed mobility C2 into a two-week digital project. We set two focal points for each week. The first week was about our black light project “The Rainbow Fish” and the second week was about our new topic, namely environmental education. In the first week, we presented our costumes, watched short film clips from the play and talked about the topic of “being different”. When have I ever felt different? How did I cope with the situation? How can this help me in other similar situations? We found out that two new students from our school quickly made friends with their classmates by immediately joining the workshop because one of their classmates was also in the workshop. Two pupils spoke Romanian and were able to support our project linguistically and thus use their strengths. This changed the situation of one pupil who had just moved to Brunswick from Moldova. In class, she was very reserved because she could not speak German well and hardly stood out there. In the club she was the main force and very important for communication in Romanian. This experience strengthened her self-confidence and she developed wonderfully. The highlight and also the conclusion of the focus on theatre education with the focus on black light theatre was the filming and the broadcast contribution at the theatre festival in Hanover, which we followed in July 2021 in the livestream. We wanted to introduce the new focus on environmental education for both groups of pupils from Germany and Romania in an action-oriented way in order to point out sustainable energy use. The aim was also to raise awareness of energy saving at home, at school and in society as a whole. In practical terms, both schools were to take part in a challenge during the digital week using specially equipped energy bicycles, as well as carrying out wind energy measurements. For this we needed equal starting positions. Our school and the regional environmental centre respectively own an energy bike and teaching aids for measuring wind energy.
Thanks to the support of the Christiani publishing house in southern Germany, we were able to transport the teaching material, which included an energy bike with accessories and an instruction manual in English, as well as a generator, a sun-powered car and wind measuring equipment to Sibiu. Everything arrived in time so that we could start our energy challenge within the project week. The challenge was to convert kinetic energy into electrical energy using wind, solar and muscle power. Here, muscle power on the energy bike was used to a) light up a normal light bulb, b) power a loudspeaker to play music and c) light up an LED lamp. The challenge also involved the use of solar energy to convert kinetic energy into electrical energy. The use of the conversion of solar energy into electrical energy and the conversion of wind energy into electrical energy could also be grasped in an action-oriented way through the teaching aids, for example solar car. The small competition was worthwhile, everyone realised how exhausting it is to generate energy ourselves and how naturally we use or even waste it. At the end of the second project week, we reflected on the whole project, once with all the pupils from both schools, then at the end of the teacher mobility C4 also with all the teachers. In addition to the learning experiences described above, the emotional experiences stand out. The pupils proved that by means of warmth, openness and interest, it is possible in a very short time to make friends with previously unknown people from another European country and to show them one’s own world. And this is so rich that our students did not want to go back after five days because they felt so comfortable. And the fact that the relationships still hold despite the pandemic and the lack of mobility says it all. This is how pupils and teachers from two European countries got to know and appreciate each other. A continuation of the partnership between the two schools is being sought by both sides.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 34999,1 Eur

Project Coordinator

Nibelungen-Realschule & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Centrul Scolar de Educatie Incluziva Nr. 2 Sibiu