Innovative and reformative thoughts are thriving in a pluralistic Europe with its individual traditions and cultures. They have not been valued enough so far in a federal Europe and not even in the different regions of its member states. Pupils are often not aware of which reformers have shaped Europe and they do not know that some of them come from their own hometowns or region. It is the main target of the project to fill this gap both on the regional and international level and to enable the participants to create a positive awareness and identification with their home and Europe.The participants of the project will be students and teachers of secondary schools in Bulgaria, Germany, Poland and Hungary. The language and cultural competences are meant to be strengthened by numerous meetings between students and teachers of the participating schools and by informing each other regularly via the platform etwinning. In addition to the project work, the participants will get an insight into the different school and education systems. The project will also intensify and increase interdisciplinary cooperation between colleagues. The participating schools will form their own profiles in the European context and intensify the European idea of cooperation. In addition, the cooperation of different committees of the schools (e.g. the parents’ representatives, the school board and the students’ representation) will be consolidated through their involvement in the project work, especially in the context of the international meetings.In addition to the engagement at the project meetings there will be an intensive studying of the work of the reformers of the individual home regions at all the participating schools. There should be a balance between the original and direct encounter with the life and the work of the reformers and the theoretical analysis with the help of literature, internet researches and audio-visual media.Apart from the above mentioned cognitive and emotional targets the project work comprises special forms of the documentation of the results. The participants of the project will develop teaching material on the topic “Europe – Home of Significant Reformers”, using the method of “learning at stations” and an interactive circulating exhibition of the results of the project work. Reports in the local media will draw attention to the project and make the population of the individual areas interested. The exhibition will be open to the public and can be shown in public institutions like schools, councils or museums. It will give people the possibility of informing themselves about European reformers, their home regions and their achievements and to learn about them. So it will contribute to an overall picture of a common Europe.The teaching material (learning at stations) and the quiz that will go with the exhibition will increase the students’ knowledge. The growth of their language and intercultural competences will be seen and experienced at the international meetings.
Without its reformers, the Europe we know today would not exist. Many students are not aware of the fact that a lot of these reformers come from their hometown areas. The aim of this project was twofold: to newly familiarise students with the innovative ideas of local reformers on the one hand and on the other to use the impetus of continuing globalisation as a starting point to get an insight into the multidisciplinary achievements of reformers abroad. The essential result of the project is an overview of the underlying principles that pushed forward the development of a European mentality. Exchanges for both students and teachers from the schools participating helped to attain this result by forming an individual opinion about how and where the reformers worked and lived. As this was a multinational cooperation, all different works on local reformers were combined and now build a more integral picture of the scientific and cultural history and development in Europe. The Freiherr-vom-Stein-Gymnasium in Betzdorf (Germany), for instance, has dealt with reformers such as Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, the inventor of credit cooperatives in the countryside, the composer Ludwig van Beethoven, the photographer August Sander and Heinrich Friedrich Karl Reichsfreiherr vom und zum Stein, the reformer of administration after whom the school was named in the 1960s. The students from Poland focussed on two reformers in the field of natural sciences: Nikolaus Kopernikus, who was born in Torun and who has changed the people’s view on astronomy during Renaissance with long-lasting effects for our modern times, and Ludwig Anton Rydgier von Rüdiger, who was born in Graudenz near Torun and who became a pioneer in treatment for cancer. The important theologian Karol Wojtyla, who became most famous as Pope John Paul II, furthered the liberation movement in the Communist countries in the East through his intercultural dialogue. These are only a few examples of the many areas in which people worked as reformers and have influenced our modern life in Europe ever since. All of the reformers dealt with in the project are intended to serve as role models for the young generation today. The four organisations participating were all secondary schools from Budapest (Hungary), Torun (Poland), Vratsa (Bulgaria) and Betzdorf (Germany). The main activities of each group in this project were informing themselves about the reformers’ lives and works, designing posters illustrating the most important facts, writing more detailed texts for a brochure and developing learning materials. The posters were publicly presented in three different exhibitions in various places, were summed up in the brochure mentioned and in addition to this, the comprehensive multimedia learning materials were evaluated during the international meetings. Thus, every participating school now benefits from a wide range of teaching materials, accompanied by illustrative posters and an informative brochure, which all have helped this project to reach and target a broad audience in the exhibitions, whose utterly positive response also the press did not miss to echo in adequate detail.