After a successful eTwinning cooperation that resulted into real exchanges of students, the French and Czech schools decided to extend the previous culturally-oriented cooperation in a new Erasmus+ project focused on a specific theme of environmental studies. Both partners agreed on involving a new partner from Slovakia, keen on this theme as well. The links at the level of school management between the Czech and Slovak schools had already existed. The schools are similar in number and age of students. Two of them are of the same type: general grammar schools; the third one is a vocational school. The project is designed to take advantage of both the similarities and differences. All three schools put emphasis on the environmental education, outdoor activities and introduction of new innovative teaching methods, thus they agreed on the following project idea: observation and comparison of systems of marking tourist paths and nature trails, as well as the types of landscape and life zones, leading to a comparison of the three partner regions of the involved schools. We aim to: - improve the communication among European students, staff and schools - encourage communication in English in real life situations, during the multinational group work and during the stay in families - encourage the environmental awareness in our students by the project activities, but also in larger public through our dissemination plan - make our students more sensitive to their surroundings, its quality and richness - make our students realize similarities and differences among three European regions, the connections of various facts and the links between the subject matter and the reality - support practical teaching methods and physical outdoor activities - develop communicative skills, ability of team work, problem solving, ICT and other skills important for work and life in students - broaden students’ cultural awareness and European feeling - create the outputs useful for teaching even after the end of the project, and also for larger public - contribute to the professional development of the teachers by sharing experience and getting inspiration from the good practice of each other, enrich our teaching methods, supporting cross-curricular teaching and incorporation of ICT into the classes During the project we will carry out three short-term exchanges of groups of pupils involving 15 pupils from each visiting country and 30 students from the organizing school. Their purpose will be to effectuate the project activities such as trips along the tourist paths, documentation, observation, study of maps, using GPS, lectures and PWP presentations and working on the project outcomes. There will be also five short-term joint staff training events focused on the project management, control and evaluation as well as the professional development of teachers, exchanging ideas concerning teaching methods and school administration. Teachers of relating subjects and members of the school management will participate, 4 adult people form each country in the first meeting, then 2 people from each country in the other meetings. In the time between the meetings we will work on distant activities aimed at study of natural features of the partner regions, observation and record of climatic conditions, discussion of the environmentalist ideas and the sustainable development. We will work via different ways like: - multinational group work in outdoor and indoor activities during the students’ meetings - task sheets, maps, encyclopaedias, ICT, photography and documentation methods - communicating and sharing information and materials via e-mails and a common Internet application of Moodle or cloud storage We intend to create the following outcomes: - a brochure describing selected tourist paths, offering important tourist information and comparison of the marking systems in the three regions - a small quadrilingual dictionary of names of animals, plants and other items related to the examined nature trails - a proposal of improvements or changes to the existing tourist paths, a proposal of a new path - a brochure comparing various geographical and biological aspects of the three partner regions - a set of maps of all three regions - a DVD carrying a documentary film about the whole project with a shortened version used as an advertisement and invitation to the world of Erasmus+ We hope that this project will create a link between pupils and staff giving them interest in natural life and outdoor activities and better understanding of their surroundings. We see the benefit of the project in the personal and professional development of both pupils and teachers and also in development of links between the schools’ managements. We believe that the project results will be used for teaching further in future, that some of the outcomes will serve to larger public and some of the findings may help to improve the quality of tourist marking in the regions.
While creating our project we proceeded from finding out that today’s youth mostly have a patchy knowledge of their environment, they do not realise enough its value, and neither do they understand the idea of sustainable development. Further we based our project on the fact that the youth have less outdoor activities and fewer opportunities to learn how to orientate themselves in the field. Important was also the realisation that among the most important skills required at the labour market there are communication skills, foreign languages, solving problems and team work. We also realised the necessity of cross-curricular teaching and long-life professional development of teachers. Our goals: -to make the youth more sensitive to their environment and its problems, to support their responsible and respectful behaviour -to improve their lifestyle supporting their attitude to non-devastating outdoor activities, especially walking, and to improve their orientation skills -to improve their skills: communication, foreign languages, team work, problem solving, interconnecting knowledge from various fields and applying them in real-life situations -to broaden their cultural awareness -to support professional development of teachers by exchanging experience with colleagues, discovering different schools, participating in workshops and lectures aimed at teaching methods -to develop cross-curricular cooperation skills in teachers All 3 partner organisations are upper-secondary schools finished by an external exam: -Grammar school Rájec-Jestřebí, coordinator, small school (about 140 students) with a family atmosphere and students aged 13-19 from varied social background, offers general education with emphasis on languages and natural sciences -Grammar school Tvrdošín, small school (about 200 students) offering general education with emphasis on languages and sports to students aged 13-19 from urban and rural social backgrounds -French MFR Les Fins, different from the 2 previous ones, vocational boarding school where in-class teaching and professional training in companies alternate, founded by association of families and professionals, subordinate to Ministry of agriculture, is also a small school with about 130 students aged 14-18 from rural social background, some of them with learning difficulties. It offers 2 study programmes: Management of nature areas, Services to people. We carried out these learning/teaching/training activities: -3 short-term exchanges of pupils with an accompanying person in the length of 6 days, each school organised one; programme: in-field activities, discovery of natural life, work with maps and GPS, observation of tourist marking, work in groups of mixed nationalities, lectures and excursions, in-class participation, etc. -5 short-term joint staff training events (2 in FR, 2 in CR, 1 in SK) aimed at students’ project work, realization of project outputs and dissemination activities (preparation, planning, monitoring...). Further activities included workshops, discussions with professionals, exchanges with colleagues, excursions aimed at professional development of teachers. 3 of them took place simultaneously with students’ meetings, 2 of them were independent. Those latter were 5 days long and aimed at launching and closing the project. We also carried out continuous activities at each partner school independently during the whole project. Their results were shared in the e-learning environment. They included weather monitoring, observation of changes in the environment during the year, biological and geographical characteristics of the three regions, examination of tourist marking systems, description of tourist trails, proposals of new trails, GPS and map work, sustainable development etc. Outputs of our project: -tangible results, such as e-learning environment with all the materials created within the project, brochure comparing our three regions, brochure promoting hiking in our regions, four-language dictionary, video of the project, proposals of new tourist paths, proposals for improvements of the existing ones, collection of tourist maps) -immaterial results, such as gained experience and skills of both students and teacher, broadening the cultural awareness, personal development Impact of the project is mainly in professional and personal development of all participants, there is also an informational and motivational impact on both school communities and public, improvement of tourist paths and creating materials for the in-class use.