Sharing & Caring Erasmus Project

Project Title

Sharing & Caring

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: Health and wellbeing; Ethics, religion and philosophy (incl. Inter-religious dialogue); Environment and climate change

Project Summary

The ERASMUS Project “Sharing & Caring” of Gomarus, Netherlands and the Christliche Schule Hochrhein, Germany, focuses on the real world of the student, covering the contemporary issues of climate and media. Student and teacher teams are shown different approaches to climate and media so they may benefit from the other school’s experience in their areas of expertise (climate for Gomarus, media in the case of Christliche Schule Hochrhein). Both schools have several years’ experience in their specific field, enabling them to give useful insights into developing learning processes in that topic at the partnering school.

The core activities of this project are two mutual exchange visits of the schools in October and May, which will be revisited after the first year. The entire project extends over a total of two years. Participating students will be limited to 15 in Year 8 (aged 14 to 16). The project aims to provide education at a secondary school level, the equivalents being HAVO/VWO in the Netherlands and Realschule in Germany.

As with other exchange projects, the standard goals of cultural exchange, understanding of differing attitudes and beliefs and the familiarization of school life will be facilitated. Specific to this project, students will be examining culturally conditioned similarities and differences in media usage among young people as well as energy production and climate impact in the partnering country. The project enables personal development by requiring the students to reflect on their own media usage. They will be required to name the risks and rewards of new technologies, the effect on health and school performance as well as how this affects the social aspects of their own lives and family. Moreover, the students will apply media skills (i.e. create a stop motion movie, video, vlog (video logging)) to present their ideas in an appealing way to their peer group. The students will create and interpret surveys to draw conclusions and find answers to various aspects of media usage in society today. These will then be compared and contrasted with different countries (NL/GER). The students will learn about sustainability and the environmental effects of energy usage and become familiar with local solutions that are currently in use. This knowledge will be imparted by trips to various generating plants (wind in the Netherlands, hydro in Germany, nuclear in Switzerland and solar in both the Netherlands and Germany). Students will then understand and be able to describe the various aspects of different regional power plants. At the end of the project it is envisioned that the participating students will know what the European environmental goals are in relation to the ‘green deal’ and be able to translate this knowledge into a personal view on the different solutions that are currently implemented throughout Europe.

Various methods will be used during the course of the project, including several practical activities that will be done by the students. All activities will focus primarily on the topics of media and energy and how they relate to each other. Concerning media, students will examine several aspects of the usage of digital media, especial the usage and impact of social media on their daily lives. They will also learn about the biology of the human body and the effect of digital media on health. This will include the following areas:
• personal exercise learning (i.e. relinquishing use of personal digital devices for 14 days)
• gathering background information to present it to fellow students
• productive learning (group construction of online surveys in Microsoft Forms or Surveymonkey to find out about the media habits of different groups of people – on the street, the school community, their hometowns, their family and friends)
• interactive learning (reflecting on one’s personal approach and habits in the usage of digital media vs real personal contact to people)

All this will culminate in reflecting on their experiences and working out suggestions to optimize personal strategies on how to use digital media at home and work. Evaluation, recording and presentation of data and the project conclusions will be given to students, their parents and interested people unaffiliated with the schools.

The topic of energy will focus on the different methods of production and various active facilities will be visited, compared and evaluated. The long term goal of the project is to encourage the participants to consider what actions they themselves can take to make their own school environmentally sustainable and present these to school management.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 65634 Eur

Project Coordinator

Gomarus SG & Country: NL

Project Partners

• Christliche Schule Hochrhein