Sustainable Living in the EU Erasmus Project

Project Title

Sustainable Living in the EU

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: Civic engagement / responsible citizenship; Environment and climate change; Health and wellbeing

Project Summary

Every day Europeans all hear the news about irreversible climate change, nature destruction and the results of unsustainable unhealthy lifestyle leading to stress and the undoubtedly strong necessity of holidays.Tourism is one of the world’s fastest growing industries and is a major source of income for many countries. Being a people-oriented industry, tourism also provides many jobs, which have helped revitalise local economies.
However, like other forms of development, tourism can also cause problems, such as environmental and ecological degradation, loss of cultural heritage and economic dependence. Learning about the impacts of tourism has led many people to seek more responsible holidays. These include various forms of alternative or sustainable tourism such as ‘nature-based tourism’, ‘ecotourism’ and ‘cultural tourism’. Sustainable tourism is becoming so popular that some say that what we presently call ‘alternative’ will be the ‘mainstream’ in a decade. Sustainable tourism is defined as “tourism that respects both local people and the traveller, cultural heritage and the environment”.
The project “Sustainable living and travelling in the EU” tackles European topics including sustainable lifestyle and school, using digital means and improving English skills through innovating English-learning methods and digital means and through personal encounters. The main objective, however, is promoting a personal commitment to forms of tourism that maximise rather than detract from sustainable human development and environmental quality.
Our school communities are constantly looking for new ways of getting to be more sstainable. As Europeans, they have an opportunity to share good practices between the European schools with the overall aim to make use of the results at the school teaching and learning plans. The participants see themselves as active Europeans citizens, who see primarily themselves, and not only governments and activist organisations, responsible to research, analyse and act on the making their schools, individual lifestyles and holidays as sustainable as possible. This to be done by sharing experience between the European schools and by looking for new ways together according to the European values like solidarity and mutual support.
For this purpose, four European schools consolidated their previous experience with diverse sustainability topics like “know your nature”, fair trade and eco-school, to research the topic of sustainable travelling, including its three pillars: ecological/ environmental, economical and cultural/social. The participants’ aim is to find the ways to promote sustainability concerning the three pillars, which is why the project countries are situated in the central, northern and southern Europe as well as overseas. This way, different geographical position while travelling and varied approach towards tackling sustainability experience in sustainability can be combined in one European project.
Specifically, the participants start by researching sustainability as the issue at hand and evaluating the level of sustainability thinking awareness, which is the starting point through providing criteria for analysing, on the one hand, their own individual lifestyle and, on the other hand, their schools. After analysing and comparing their results with the partner European participants, active change to the better sustainability levels are planned. This refers especially to travelling concerning the environmental aspects and making up for the carbon footprint, as well as to the economical and cultural impact produced while travelling, each aspect being a topic to a mobility, in which the participants will work together in sharing and finding new best practices.
All the results will be used for the teaching and learning culture in the participating schools and will be presented to the world community by various modern digital methods including the final movie and means like padlets explaining videos. Additionally, the project pays special attention to sharing practice on innovative communicative language learning means and methods, all of which are to be introduced into the teaching and learning plans.

Project Website

http://twinspace.etwinning.net/92695/pages/page/855296

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 131800 Eur

Project Coordinator

Bettina-von-Arnim-Gymnasium & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Pyhäselän koulu
• San Nikolas ikastola Sociedad Cooperativa
• AMEP