The project Culture and History without Borders: Success in Diversity, Diversity in Success is a strategic partnership of three elementary and two high schools from Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Italy and Turkey. The partnership was formed as a result of a number of earlier projects, especially eTwinning, in which the partners got to cooperate on themes of culture and history. The project builds on the previous experiences and takes them one step further, adding the "success in diversity and diversity in success" dimension. The goals of the project are therefore aimed at greater historical and cultural awareness, improvement of language skills, establishing of personal friendships across Europe, improving of digital skills, sharing and improving of teaching methods and at keeping a focus on the connection to life outside the school – the community, entrepreneurship, employability and competitiveness. There will be120 active participants from among pupils aged 11 to 15. Also, there are 120 mobilities planned for pupils. There will be 20 teachers active in the project. A group of eight accompanying persons is always going to supervise each of the exchanges. Most of the project activities will take place locally via the so called cultural/historical workshops (each partner will organize 12 of them throughout the duration of the project) focusing on themes such as seasonal traditions, historical periods in our region, arts and handicrafts, cuisine and performing arts. To connect these activities with the theme of success in diversity and diversity in success we are going to include discussions, reflections, reviews and feedback sessions as part of all local activities. Internationally, we are going to meet five times at the exchanges with pupils where we will bring our work to the next level – face-to-face cooperation, co-creation and sharing. Each partner is going to host one exchange for 24 pupils from abroad accompanied by eight persons. After every exchange a conference call will summarize the experience. While the hands-on experiences are going to be the backbone of the project, their recording (audio, video, photos), reflections, subsequent discussions, feedback and documentation (articles) are the flesh of the project. We want the participants to assume a great deal of responsibility for their own learning process and for their personal project outcomes, especially in relation to the themes of diversity and success. That means that a lot of reflective, impact-related and feedback-oriented questions will be asked in connecting with each activity. The project outcomes are going to be gathered and edited in the form of a project chronicle/journal. We expect it to include thematic chapters such as international songbook, international cookbook, multilingual mini-dictionary, local stories, fairytales and legends, and a diary of activities. We believe that the project Culture and History without Borders: Success in Diversity, Diversity in Success is going to have a lasting impact on the individual participants (greater self-awareness, language skills, digital skills, local connection and labour market competitiveness), the schools involved (modern teaching methods, digital and language skills, international project teamwork experience), on the local community (greater international visibility, feedback from the visitors, pride of local pupils) and on our European societies (citizens who are more entrepreneurial, better prepared for their active participation in the labour market and more in touch with their local culture and history, while confident and joyful in relation to the rest of Europe).
The project was created as a result of the former cooperation among our five schools – mostly as an eTwinning “follow-up activity”: • Kunst hat keine Grenzen (a common project of Gimnazjum w Zespole, Mielżyn and TSSYAL Antakya, 2013/14) • Cultural heritage of my country (a common project of Základní škola Přimda and ICS San Tommaso d'Aquino, 2014/15) • Kunst ohne Grenzen (a common project of Základní škola Přimda, Gimnazjum w Zespole, Mielżyn and TSSYAL Antakya, 2014/15) The only one non-eTwinning project was the project called Bookmark which was realized between Základní škola Přimda and Základná škola s materskou školou Zubrohlava. It is a Czech-Slovak cultural project which is organized by Národní pedagogické museum a knihovna J. A. Komenského in Prague and Slovenská pedagogická knižnica in Bratislava. The topics of all these projects were always culture and history, so we decided to realize a common project focused on the culture and history of our countries. The aim of the project was to make our pupils familiar with the culture and history of our countries. They were allowed to learn more about the history and culture of their own countries through the so called cultural-historical workshops which were organized in the particular partner schools. Each school promised to organize at least 12 cultural-historical workshops. The content of the workshops was different, but it was always connected with the culture and history of the country. Our pupils created decorations for different festivals (Christmas, Easter,…), learnt about old traditions, learnt dances, songs, tried out different old arts (marbling, mosaics,…), cooked traditional recipes, learnt about the history of their region thanks to different excursions. They introduced their new knowledge to their friends from partner countries during the international learning activities and through the presentations, videos and tasks in our TwinSpace. Pupils and teachers from all our countries learnt lots of information about their partners’ countries and they learnt more about the culture and history of their own country. They could compare, what we have similar and what is different. We organized 5 international learning activities, where 121 pupils and 40 teachers participated. Five schools participated in this project: 3 primary schools (from the Czech Republic, Italy and Slovakia) and two secondary schools (from Poland and Turkey). Pupils who worked on the project were 11 – 15 years old. The main output of our project was our project chronicle which consists of the project diary, international cookbook and international songbook, book of the legends and a dictionary of the basic phrases in seven languages. Each partner was responsible for one part of the chronicle: Czech group for the project diary, Italian group for the cookbook, Slovak group for the songbook, Turkish group for the book of legends and the Polish group for the multilingual dictionary. The other outputs of our project are presentations and videos from the particular workshops and international learning activities. Pupils who participated in the project improved their language skills (we used English and German for the communication during the project and this is the reason why we used both the languages in our final output – the project chronicle). They improved their digital skills too because we used ICT for our project work. One of the most important things is that they learnt how to cooperate in an international team – they improved their social, personal and learning competences, competences for work and for problems’ solution. The most important output of our project is probably that it was able to break down the barriers and prejudice among our nations and cultures which is really very important in nowadays world. The project didn’t touch only our schools, it influenced the life in our local communities too (especially during the international learning activities and international project meetings). It increased not only the prestige of our schools, but the prestige of our villages, towns and cities too. Our project has changed the attitude of the participating pupils to their peers from other countries; it broke down the prejudice and barriers. It helped the pupils to be more self-contained and self-confident. We created new friendships during the project and our cooperation didn’t end at the end of the project. Some of the partners have started new projects under the programme Erasmus+ or under eTwinning.