Interculture-dedicated education and learning Erasmus Project

Project Title

Interculture-dedicated education and learning

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: Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

Our main objectives were to change our teaching habits finding out new methods using intercultural education and lifelike situations in order to make our schools a better place.There were four participating schools being geographically far away from each other, different in size and their curriculum, which made the project even more exciting.The cooperation among teachers and students was very successful. We dare to say that both students and teachers learned a lot. All the four schools added a great amount of work to the success of the project. We intended to develop more positive thinking and motivation towards teaching and learning and this objective was achieved through the new types of activities and tasks. Our students enjoyed solving these types of tasks, participating in these activities.They had exciting activities such as organizing a debate, writing a speech, planning the programme of a mobility, creating artistic works, etc. They used different digital tools to maintain contact, first of all our etwinning platform, but we had more facebook groups during the project and student liked using instagram, too. So we could make a good use of these tools to improve students’ interest towards learning. The relationship between teachers and students has also changed. We could develop a very effective, interactive cooperation between students and teachers and we could achieve that students trusted more in their teachers and they didn’t look at teachers as ’far away’ people, but a s a kind of supporters who are always at hand to help them.In this way our schools could become more attractive places and it was a key point in our project.We succeeded in giving our students as many new types of tasks in different subject groups as possible and now we know better what sort of tasks can improve their skills and knowledge the best, how they can reach better academic results. The intercultural feature could add a lot to the success of our project, it helped us to make school more exciting for students, which was a great challenge for teachers as they also had to learn a lot, for example about the use of the most fashionable gadgets, but it was very useful and could serve the goal to have a better relationship with our students. As students worked and learned in international groups,cooperation, solving problems and studying in these teams were a motivating experience for them as they could see that studying needn’t be only a boring and individual activity and that they can improve their knowledge more efficiently in this way. Another goal of the project was to foster key competences in a lot of areas because of the wide range of subjects in the work plan, Mathematics and Science, Humanities, Arts and Physical education, ICT and languages. We could achieve this objective, too as we changed the subject groups in every two or three months and we also paid attention to key competences during mobilities where we could try ways of teaching and learning outside the school area. Through cooperation and international team work we taught our students to improve their social competences, develop their sense of initiative as during solving the new types of tasks in a more modern way we enhanced their ability to turn ideas into action with creativity and innovation, and to plan and manage a project. We shouldn’t forget about teachers’ and students’ language skills. This project’s aim was to enable them to use English more actively, to fight against language barriers. When working in the international teams and during the project meetings and mobilities the participants both students and teachers used mainly English as a lingua franca and they could gain practice in mediation and intercultural understanding. Participants improved their level of proficiency in listening, speaking, reading and writing in the common language, English, and they got into contact with rare languages, Hungarian, Romanian, Portuguese and Turkish, too. During the project the partners could find opportunities to travel and experience there the meaning of ‘open borders’, get to know new countries and cultures that are far away from their homeland in order to deepen their acceptance of the general European values.To sum up our main goal was achieved, we could help the professional development of the staffs of the partner schools and teach our students how to be able to enjoy learning and do it more efficiently with the help of intercultural teaching and learning, as well as European cooperation.We can declare that we could achieve the main goals of the planned project, the teachers and the students of the four participating schools worked hard, fulfilling their tasks and reaching a higher level of understanding finding intercultural teaching and learning very efficient and at last but not least extremely enjoyable. We think the cooperation among the four school will remain and we would like to have further common projects, perhaps KA1 job shadowing visits.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 136030 Eur

Project Coordinator

Budakeszi Nagy Sándor József Gimnázium & Country: HU

Project Partners

• ALDEMIR ATILLA KONUK ANADOLU LISESI
• Seminário Diocesano de Leiria – Colégio de S. Miguel
• Liceul Pedagogic Bod Peter