Young Tourism: listen and discover. Erasmus Project

Project Title

Young Tourism: listen and discover.

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: Creativity and culture; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

With regard to a worrying high unemployment rate among young people in Europe, we suggested a mulitlateral association project whereby pupils should approach to the business world. The objectives of this project were to enhance the acquisition of skills and competences that are considered as important by recruiters of companies and the promotion of entrepreneurial thinking & empowerment of students by producing audio guides.
The context we had chosen in this project “YOUNG TOURISM: listen and discover.” was tourism which is economically one of the most important sectors world-wide (230 million jobs in mobility, hotel industry,entertainment, service providers, marketing and communication). The global phenomena of mass-tourism destroys nature, the traditional infrastructure and culture of a region. In this project, we took young tourists away from typical mass-tourism places and sensitized them for a more responsible tourism.Sustainability and regionalism in terms of environmental, cultural and social issues were promoted. Students are an important target group in tourism of today and tomorrow. We prepared them to behave as customers aware of the consequences of their behavior. The areas in which our 5 partner schools are located are less known and little popular as travel destinations for young people: in the north of Europe (Laitila/Finnland), in the middle of Europe (Fritzlar/Northern Hesse,Germany, Wroclaw/Poland), in the south-west of Europe (Montijo/Extremadura,Spain) and in the south of Europe (San Miniato/Italy).The participants of our project, aged between 13 and 19 years, experienced the natural and cultural richness of different European areas and promoted it to young people all over Europe by creating multilingual audio guides (Spanish, Italian, Polish, German,Finnish, English).This electronic tool allows customers to discover places of interest on their own. It is available in the “real life” as download on mobiles published on different websites (e.g. tourism offices, our school homepages, other stakeholders: “Medienblitz e.V.”,Kassel etc.). This “real life experience” stimulated the students to create products of high quality.The impact of our project is enormous even after the completion due to the fact that the audio guides are used by young people (and other people) discovering our areas. Audio guides can easily be produced in schools with the help of user-friendly digital software.Therefore,audio editors and recorders are the perfect tool to be embedded in the school curricula. The audio guides have already been used by students from other schools in the surrounding.
During the international meetings, the young people learnt from others and deepened their knowledge in the fields of tourism, media etc. They were introduced to different techniques and methods to produce audio guides by a variety of experts dealing with tourism marketing as well as with media and communication.In this way, they became experts themselves and were able to “teach” their mates.Thus, the project combined these both sides of education (learning and teaching) to improve the self-esteem and self-worth of each student.
The production of audio guides was a sophisticated process that was realized in different steps: 1) getting familiar with the places that are presented on the audio guides, 2) inventing & writing storyboards, 3) choosing & producing noises,music, 4) recording in different languages, 5) cutting &montage, 6) editorial work by tourism and media experts and language teachers.
Media & computer technologies represent a fascinating world for young people, the “digital natives”. We derived benefit from it in order to promote empowerment & critical consumer awareness related to sustainable issues. We enhanced active media work that imparted abilities to the young people which they need for a self-confident & responsible utilisation of new media. The evaluation forms at the end of each learning activity showed that the students developed a variety of skills and competences:
– professional skills: customer-orientated approach, business expertise (choice of presentation format), entrepreneurial thinking,practical doing
– methodological skills:project management, efficient problem solving,results orientation
– personal skills:creativity,self-empowerment
– social skills: teamwork,communication, sense of responsibility
– ICT skills: use of innovative web tools (audio guides), research &selection of digital information
– language skills: acquisition of technical vocabulary (tourism), confident use of foreign languages during the production of the audio guides, use of mother tongue (recording texts) etc.
The production of audio guides in a transnational project was the appropriate way to promote the acquisition of important skills and competences as well as entrepreneurship thinking & empowerment of young people. Please have a look at the whole project: https://youtu.be/u-SalV0c140

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 106225 Eur

Project Coordinator

Ursulinenschule Fritzlar & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Istituto Tecnico Statale CARLO CATTANEO
• Liceum Ogolnoksztalcace Siostr Urszulanek Unii Rzymskiej
• IES VEGAS BAJAS
• Varppeen koulu