Strengthening European Identity through our cultural heritage Erasmus Project

Project Title

Strengthening European Identity through our cultural heritage

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: Cultural heritage/European Year of Cultural Heritage; Teaching and learning of foreign languages; Creativity and culture

Project Summary

The European Year of Cultural Heritage of 2018 including the motto of “Sharing Heritage” seeks to make our cultural heritage visible and accessible for every citizen. We as teachers felt challenged to make young Europeans understand and experience that they are bound together by their common cultural and historical European background. This is what we wanted to achieve in our project “Strengthening European Identity through our common cultural heritage”.
With this project of strategic education partnership we were able to foster the following objectives:
– to demonstrate the importance of learning and active use of French and German as a communication means in EU (from
student/teacher exchange programmes Erasmus + graduate studies, to its application at labour market),
– to strengthen the common European culture among the youth,
– to deepen open-mindedness to cultural diversity,
– to help the young people to realize and acknowledge the value of culture and traditions of a particular region and country
they come from.
– to strengthen the importance of social contact throughout the EU

Three secondary schools (Gymnasien) from Germany, France and Slovakia achieved the above mentioned objectives through discovery and presentation of both tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Our focus was set on the industrial and Roman cultural heritage and mores and costumes of the three countries. The students got familiar with the material and tangible heritage of a particular region through dance and art workshops, the production of traditional tools workshops, excursions to medieval towns, the industrial history of Paris and many other industrial historic sights. They also got to know the concept of sustainable development and its importance for the continued existence of our common heritage.
The desired output of the performed academic mobilities was to achieve through presentations, in which the students were able to inform about their findings and about what they learned, information on the schools’ homepages and an exhibition about the three regions and their peculiarities. The target groups of the project, apart from the participants themselves,were also students at university who participated partly at the project. The general population of the regions was included by an exhibition in the respective townhalls at the end of the project.
To achieve our goals, we especially applied the following methods: blended learning, project based learning, group learning and peer teaching, using eTwinning as a safe communication platform.
We are very glad that we were able to achieve most of our intended objectives but what is also important is that we launched a lasting cooperation of the three participating schools, make learning a more interesting experience and also create informal relationships among the participants, which will benefit them both professionally and personally.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 84554 Eur

Project Coordinator

Schubart-Gymnasium & Country: DE

Project Partners

• OGEC SAINT VINCENT DE PAUL
• Gymnázium Jána Adama Raymana