My place, your place / La mine, la tine Erasmus Project

Project Title

My place, your place / La mine, la tine

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 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Teaching and learning of foreign languages; Cultural heritage/European Year of Cultural Heritage; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

Our project was born in the context of the France-Romania Season in 2019, with the purpose to enrich the citizenship education program of our pupils, in order to fight against the prejudices and discriminations which are often attached to Eastern Europe. We would like to introduce them to the cultural and linguistic diversity of the European heritage and to develop their practice of foreign languages and their social and linguistic skills.
Goerge Enescu and Principesa Maria Middle Schools, attached to Mihail Cantacusino High School in Romania, and Les Gâtines René Cassin Middle School in France gather a great number of teenagers (114), aged 11 to 15 years.
Indeed, in a context of political crisis agitating the European Union, we felt the need to help build their European citizen identity, and to promote cooperation and exchanges based on our common heritage, historical, artistic and literary heritage on the one hand, and linguistic on the other hand, since Romanian and French are two roman languages and our two countries are members of the International Organisation of La Francophonie.
It also seemed crucial to us that they could build a more accurate representation of the everyday reality, and of the rich and diverse European culture.
Finally, we intended to develop our pupils’ foreign language skills.

Those objectives were achieved through many activities:
– letters, postcards and videos were created and sent to introduce themselves, get acquainted and discover their mutual surroundings,
– researches on several subjects (personalities, artists, ecology, literature, traditions and culture), creations of posters: on French personalities, on the Romanian’s environment and ecology, on European languages and their origins, on the economics, history, geography, demography, political and social structures of our two countries, artistical creations such as soap sculptures, Indian ink drawings, audio-book adapted from Dracula,
– exhibition during the Erasmus Days and the Francophonie Days,
– introduction to the basics of Romanian language through short videos,
– interventions of associations : discovery of Sinaia, introduction on the issues shared by our two countries regarding migrations and the reception of Rom populations,
– French student’s mobility in Romania where they discovered the living conditions of the Romanian pupils. Despite the impossibility to carry out the second mobility due to the pandemic of Covid-19, our students had at least the chance to meet in person, and visit together the monuments of Sinaia, as well as their daily living spaces (their schools and family houses).

Our project thus enabled the students involved to enlarge their vision of Europe and bond with teenagers across our continent in the long term : informal and personal relationships are still growing between several of the participants, through social medias such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
Thanks to feedback forms and each student’s log book, we were able to notice that prejudices had disappeared.

The students have themselves been the ambassadors of the project in their schools, bringing other students along in taking a keen interest into maintaining the exchange. They could then share the good knowledge they acquired regarding the history, geography and culture of our countries.
Our pupils also improved their linguistic skills during the project because they had at heart to share and communicate about their daily life, families and friends, their hobbies and likings, and were interested in understanding one another.

The project had a deep impact inside the school on the students and also on the teachers and the adult teams of our middle schools, as well as on the parents: new teachers wished to join the project, families of students who were not involved directly in the project asked that it would carry on.
We were unable to perform the in-person exhibition we had planned due to the pandemic, but the blog dedicated to the mobility experienced a strong growth of readers.

Municipal structures and associations have been strongly involved in this project. We are considering to carry on our partnership outside the contractual structure, with the associations that had worked with us on this project and the partners schools in order to create a long-term Franco-Romanian friendship inside our schools, thanks to an exchange club.

We still hope we will be able to organize public exhibitions as soon as the sanitary conditions will improve, gathering the students, the education community, our partner associations, other local schools as well as the municipality and the Government representatives. We thus wish to create an exchange network between several schools of Savigny-sur-Orge and the school complex in Sinaia, in order to maintain the ties forged between the pupils, the teaching staff, the volunteers and the associations, thus enabling a mutual cultural, linguistic, artistic and civic enrichment in the long run.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 20424,44 Eur

Project Coordinator

Collège Les Gâtines – René Cassin & Country: FR

Project Partners

• Colegiul Mihail Cantacuzino Sinaia