That’s Europe Erasmus Project

Project Title

That’s Europe

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: International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation; Civic engagement / responsible citizenship; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

All of us in Europe experience every day the advantage of living on a continent with few borders and wars and the richness we gain constantly facing other cultures.
The schools participating in the project are six high schools from Germany, Italy, Denmark, France, Spain and The Netherlands. Some of us have been working together for a long time on international projects, others are new but with a certain experience in international activities. Every day we witness events that put the idea of a united Europe into discussion. As we strongly believe in the importance of being part of a larger entity that includes several different languages, traditions and backgrounds still with a common view of democracy, we want to make our students aware of the common values at the basis of a united Europe.
The students we want to involve in the project are 15 to 18 years of age with different cultural backgrounds and attending different kinds of school.
Each partner plans to work with a group of 25-30 students at home and we expect to have about 40 students involved in each mobility. We want the students to reflect on the meaning of being European by letting them work on key words/concepts referring to EU and Europe as a cultural and historical entity. Between the mobilities the students from each school will have as homework to develop their own definitions of these basic concepts of Europe. At the mobilities they will work together in transnational groups to find a common definition using innovative working methods and structured debate techniques in order to formulate the “Charter of Europe” containing main characteristics of Europe.
In order to enhance the cooperation and to stimulate their creativity, we will ask them to invent board games on specific topics related to Europe.
A group of students from different countries will document the activities of the whole week filming a video.
After five mobilities, as soon as they have necessary tools to understand how the European institutions work, we will take them to visit the EU Parliament in Brussels, the offices of the national parliament members and meeting the MP’s themselves. We will also visit some of the national representation offices at EU of our member states in order to get an insight in European collaboration.
At the same time we will exchange students for 2 months in order to strengthen the cooperation among European schools and at the same time to give the chance to some selected students to develop European citizeship and to serve as an exemple for others.
There will be also one short-term joint staff training meeting, where the teachers will meet experts on innovative teaching methods and of e-twinning as we want to improve, exchange and evaluate our teaching skills to properly guide and support the working process of our pupils.

Results
The most important result will be what we decided to call “Charter of European Youth”, that is all the keywords/concepts with the common definition as in alphabetical order. It will be made accessible on an open platform linked to the project website along with the presentations of the homework definitions developed between the mobilities by the participating students and their classmates.
At the end we will have several board games referring to different aspects Europe ( for ex. culture, history, politics, history of Arts, daily life in different countries, food). This will allow for bouth the students and others to put the work on the keywords into a concrete context in a creative and playful way. A choice of the best games will be put into production and also be made available on the website.
A third result will be the videos on the European value topics produced during the mobilities, these will also be made available on the project website. During the mobility to Brussels the production of the videos will serve the purpose of explaining the inner functions of the institutions of the EU to a larger public oy young people.

Impact
The most important impact on the students will be the awareness of being part of Europe, its meaning, its advantages, its history, its institutions. But, as the Charter will be uploaded to an open source and linked to the national products, all the materials will be available to other teachers in our schools and outside to be used with other students as a source of information or as starting points for a lesson.
The board games will be used by other people in the families or in schools.
In general, this project is designed to improve the understanding of Europe as a common cultural, historical and political entity and in this sens as the most important project of peace since 1945.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 196913 Eur

Project Coordinator

Rottmayr Gymnasium Laufen & Country: DE

Project Partners

• ISISS “G. VERDI”
• Gymnasium Beekvliet
• Lycée des Métiers COLBERT
• IES Sierra Nevada
• Gladsaxe Gymnasium