The Pangea project is the fruit of the cooperation of six secondary schools in six different countries: Finland, Hungary, Spain, Poland, Turkey and the United Kingdom. With this project we would like to give the students of these schools to learn about each other, each others’ cultures through reading. The activities will require the participants to improve their intercultural, ICT, language and reading skills. The objectives of the project include promoting reading literature, the learning of foreign languages, the study of other cultures and intercultural communication. During the activities the participating students will be able to hone their ICT skills as well, since they will have to learn and use Prezi, the presentation software, write a blog and use ICT in creating their exercises. It is our most important objective to make the participating countries’ cultures more accessible for our students through literature and team work. Entire classes of the participating schools will participate in the project. Every school year at least two classes of the schools will read the chosen short story and prepare activities for the other participating students. The partner organisations will select the students who will participate in the transnational project meetings along with their teachers. At the meetings, two students will take part with two teachers from each partner school. Since the partner schools are quite different, the profiles of the students vary greatly: some of the students studying in vocational classes, others are studying in academic classes. However, they are all studying at secondary schools. Before the meetings, the host partner will choose a short story from their own country that is freely available on the Internet in English in an electronic format. This short story will be offered to the students of all the partner schools to read. The deadline for the reading will always be two weeks before the transnational meetings. The participating schools will have to ensure that at least one class from their school reads the short story. Also before the meetings, the students will have to prepare tasks and exercises to study the text. This will be facilitated by their own teachers. The partners will offer the students types of tasks that they may prepare, for example: putting sentences describing the plot in the correct order, collecting characteristics of the characters in the story, performing a short part of the story, writing a prologue to the short story, creating a presentation (using the software Prezi) about the author, etc. During the transnational meetings, the international group of students will work together on their tasks and exercises and will present them in the class of the host school which read the short story. The students will be responsible for ordering the activities and carry out the tasks: they will ask the host school’s students to do the exercises, they will perform their bits of the short story, they will give their presentations, etc. The participating students will have to write down their experiences and publish them on the blog of the project, the Pangea blog. The participating teachers would also collect the tasks, presentations and experiences and publish lesson plans on the websites of the partner schools in both English and their respective mother tongue. The teachers will annotate and supplement the students’ work. The activities, the exercises, the link to the short story in English and in its original language, the lesson plans will be freely available on the Internet for anyone interested. We envisage improvement in our students’ reading, social, ICT, language and organisational skills as well. The students will become more motivated for reading in their mother tongue and in English as well, they will learn about working on an international team. Intercultural dialogue will make them more open-minded and knowledgeable. The participating schools will be more international, will gain more experience in organising international meetings and working with their colleagues from other countries. The materials produced in the project will include tasks, exercises, lesson plans, presantations on the short stories read by the students. Potentially, the benefits of Pangea will outlast the duration of the project. The materials produced during the transnational meetings will remain posted on the six websites of the participating schools so that teachers at other institutions will also be able to use them. We will also disseminate the results and the materials to our national and international partners as well.
Background of the project: before we started to write Pangea project we wanted our teachers and students to work together and gain experience in international cooperation and we wanted to focus on creativity and we also felt that our students don't really like reading and they don't know much about other countries literature which we thought were crucial if we wanted them to understand other nations culture. This project fitted well into the internationalising strategy of the school as six schools work together which gave the opportunity both for the students and the teachers to cooperate internationally, to practice English language, to meet peers from other EU countries. Objectives: our objectives were to promote the improvement of reading skills by reading short stories of six nations. We also aimed to make our students to study about cultures, international communication and as we involved ICT tools another objective was to make the participants use these tools to write a blog and to give presentations in different creative ways. At last but not least the promotion of the study of the English language was highlighted among the objectives as all the materials, lesson plans, the short stories, the communication went on in English. The participating organisations were Gimnazjum Nr 5 w Przemyslu from Poland (https://pangeateam.wordpress.com/category/pangea-teams/poland/), Avonbourne Academy from UK (https://pangeateam.wordpress.com/category/pangea-teams/united-kingdom/), WinNova from Finland (https://pangeateam.wordpress.com/category/pangea-teams/finland/), MATSO Denizcilik Anadolu Meslek Lisesi from Turkey (https://pangeateam.wordpress.com/category/pangea-teams/turkey/), IES GABRIEL MIRÓ from Spain (https://pangeateam.wordpress.com/category/pangea-teams/spain/) and our school, Andrássy Catholic Business Academy from Hungary (https://pangeateam.wordpress.com/category/pangea-teams/hungary/). The schools represented a wide range from general grammar schools to different types of vocational schools. We undertook the following main activities: we had six international project meetings where teachers and students representing their schools worked together in international teams and each of the schools presented one short story from their national literature using dramatisation, presentations, puppet show, mock-ups and cartoons, comics (https://pangeateam.wordpress.com/). Between the transnational meetings the schools involved students in great numbers to read the short stories and to find creative ways to present them. In the schools there were exhibitions, afternoon literature classes, performances which the members of the participating groups published on the blogs of the project. The teachers worked on creating lesson plans and collecting tasks while they also annotated and supplemented the students' work (https://pangeateam.wordpress.com/category/lesson-plans/). The students received education to use ICT tools like Prezi, cartoon making programmes, blog writing. Results and impacts: our students have become more motivated to read in their mother tongue and in English. They gained experience in working in international cooperation. The number of participants at the national English reading competitions has tripled at Andrássy. Our students have become more open-minded and curious towards other cultures. The teachers have shared the tasks, excersises, lesson plans, presentations they had produced on six websites. The students and the teachers learnt to use several electronic devices such as desktop computers, laptops, e-book readers, tablets and smart phones. They have learnt to create tasks with ICT tools and they have learnt to use Prezi software. The organisational and intercultural skills of participants also have improved. Another very important result is a website (https://pangeateam.wordpress.com) which contains all the blogs, lesson plans, activities that we have done. Longer term benefits: since we published the results of the project online all the teachers of literature and English will be able to use these materials of the short stories for motivation and cultural improvements in their classes. Another long term benefit is that the participants have become committed to reading, studying, getting to know other nations, habits; have gained experience in foreign countries which will enhance their willingness to take part in other international projects; have become more motivated to improve their English language competences. (https://pangeateam.wordpress.com/2017/06/27/final-reflexion-about-pangea-project-by-ricardo-canovas-spanish-teacher/)