Tell Us About Yourself Erasmus Project

Project Title

Tell Us About Yourself

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 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Integration of refugees; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning

Project Summary

Resulting from a perceivable trend towards conformity among our students, we began our ERASMUS+ KA2 project “Tell Us About Yourself. Exploring and Celebrating Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Schools and Local Communities Across Europe”. The title of the project “Tell Us About Yourself” was intended to be open so as to avoid quick and short answers. Instead we wanted our student to embark on a journey into themselves. Throughout the project the participating thirty sixth-form students and seven teachers of 1 EPAL Gera/Lesvos (Greece), IMS Private School Limassol (Cyprus) and Phoenix Gymnasium Wolfsburg-Vorsfelde (Germany) were seizing ample opportunity to learn about themselves by answering questions like “Who am I?” “Where are my roots?” “Where am I going?” – questions vital for every human being. Answering them for yourself in the context of your own community of peers can be an interesting and inspiring endeavour. Yet by making the students deal with these questions with peers from two European countries, they became part of a setting for a cultural dialogue which made it possible for those involved to obtain unexpected results and a more profound level of understanding of their own identity. This was the first level of our project: the topic of “Cultural Diversity.” After some negotiating, the group defined it as “what makes each of us unique”, “the individual, exclusive story someone can tell.” The outcome where refugee stories, stories of migration, stories of belonging to two European national identities caused by the multitude of migration movements within Europe in the decades following the Second World War. Another kind of stories emerging form this dialogue where the stories of the enchantment and the difficulties of adolescents forming their identity, which can also mean that they would have to cope with bullying. On a second, methodological level, students became familiar with the “Oral History Interview”. They learned how to prepare themselves for the interview and recorded a few together with their teachers. In doing so, they realized that their own personal story has historiographic value. On a third level the two previously mentioned aspects were combined in a digital story our students had to prepare about themselves. They used user-friendly digital tools such as Moviemaker and WeVideo for that purpose. The stories evolving from that process are available in the ERASMUS+ Project Results Platform. These were the three levels that structured out work on the project. We considered the three short term exchanges of our students in Limassol (February 2018), Wolfsburg (November 2018) and Gera/ Lesvos (June 2019) to be milestones that gave them opportunities for the continuing cultural dialogue, ideas and input about the topic and the methods used so as to be able to continue working successfully in between the short exchanges of students.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 46100 Eur

Project Coordinator

Phoenix Gymnasium Wolfsburg-Vorsfelde & Country: DE

Project Partners

• 1o Epagelmatiko Lykeio Geras
• Lewisham Southwark College
• IMS Private School