Our project “European survival: the rule of the 3 Rs” targets CLIL students from the different European participating countries (Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and Spain) aged 13/14 at the beginning of the project and 16 at the end of it. Our project first general goal is to improve the participating students’ level of both communicative and intercultural competences by means of working transnationally on topics included in the different CLIL subjects, by having them work cooperatively from an early age within the Secondary education (13 /14year-olds), within both task-based and content-based approach. Therefore, through this project, we have gathered schools who have a long lasting experience in CLIL programmes, together with schools where the programme is merely starting, in order to share knowledge, expertise, different perspectives and ideas on CLIL. In order to achieve this first general goal, we had to choose a topic that could be approached in a multidisciplinary way, so that the different CLIL subjects could contribute to it. Given the situation we have in Europe nowadays, when there are some many refugees and asylum seekers at our borders, lacking the most essential means for survival, while most of our youngsters live immerse in consumerism frenzy, we considered we could make the most of our CLIL focus by raising awareness of what is really necessary, through dealing with the topics connected to survival skills (air, water, shelter, food).Thus, our second general goal is to make our students aware of the frailty of human beings and the concept of what is really basic for survival and how to rationally use it, avoiding its waste, valuing the ingenious ways in which human beings have managed to make the most of the resources they have around them, and helping to preserve the resources still available. Thus, following the rule of 3s for survival in extreme situations, we will focus on the 3 minutes without air, 3 hours without shelter, 3 days without water and 3 weeks without food as the motivators to deal with these four topics from all the different subjects and perspectives. As for the need to carry out this project transnationally, we have devised this project so that it allows students to develop intercultural communication skills, but also it will imply for students comparing consume habits in the different countries, working transnationally on awareness campaigns and videos, and furthermore,for the teachers involved from the different countries. exchanging CLIL materials, ideas and techniques which will end up being part of an online self access CLIL training course.Thus, and bearing in mind the internationalization of our schools, we have chosen schools from very different countries in Europe, in order to provide our students with diverse perspectives and views on European shared values, an aim which could never be attained through a merely national association. Regarding the activities, in order to guarantee coordination, three general transnational meetings, will be held: the first one in Spain, and the other two in Bulgaria and in Portugal, with the objective of planning the agenda, discussing key issues and monitoring and assessing the activities.We have planned to develop twelve local activities (four each year) in which students will be asked to accomplish specific tasks onthe different topics. Finally there will be two short term exchange of students per year, one in each of the participating countries, to work together and create internationally team –produced outputs.Not only the students participating in this project will benefit from it, but also the teaching staff from the participating institutions,the whole educational communities of the partner schools, Local Communities and other European teachers, students andeducational communities in general.Through the production of an online self access CLIL training course, we intend to transcend the scope of our schools andshare our learning products and results not only locally but worldwide through the Internet, thus fostering the usage of English as a Lingua Franca, helping improve the CLIL curricular tasks and projects in oter schools starting their path along the difficult but fascinating CLIL road.We expect this project to have a pervading impact on our schools and local communities. Its expected outputs have been devised tobe sustainable open access resources, which will remain accessible on the Internet, and which may be easily exploited by otherschools and educational associations and institutions all over the world.
Our project “European survival: the rule of the 3 Rs” has been developed throughout three years of intense cooperation among the six European participating schools, from Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and Spain. The project targeted CLIL 8Content and Language Integrated Learning) students aged 13/14 at the beginning of the project and 16 at the end of it. For this reason, we selected schools which have long-lasting experience in CLIL programmes, together with schools where the programme was merely starting, so that the development of the project could trigger the implementation of CLIL. Our project general goal was to improve the participating students’ level of both communicative and intercultural competences by means of working transnationally on topics included in the different CLIL subjects, within both task-based and content-based approaches. In order to achieve this general goal, we had to choose a topic that could be approached in a multidisciplinary way, so that the different CLIL subjects could contribute to it. Thus, we decided on the topics connected to survival skills (air, water, shelter, food).Furthermore, our second general goal was to make our students aware of the concept of what is really basic for survival and how to rationally use it, avoiding its waste, and helping to preserve the resources still available, by means of reducing, reusing and recycling, putting a stop to consumerism. Regarding the activities, we have carried out several activities following the guidelines set each time by a different participating country. The activities have included creating musical instruments from recycled materials, studying the water consume, the carbon footprint, survival activities with the army, learning about the different types of refugees and housing, learning about the traditional dishes that emerged as the result of hunger or lack of resources, the interviews to refugees and immigrants or geocaching. The results and also the guidelines to develop these CLIL tasks have been made available online at the project website and listed on the European Results plattform, so they may be reused by other CLIL teachers in Europe, as a self-access CLIL repository of activities. We consider this project has had a positive impact on the educational community of the different schools as we have checked that, for example, the water consumption of the families involved in the project has decreased since it started. Furthermore, the participating students have lead different initiatives and campaigns of water consume reduction and recycling, reusing and reducing in the different educational centres. On the other hand, the project has received several quality distinctions both in Spain and Romania. The long term mobilities, one of which was distinguished due to its quality by SEPIE, and which were only 4 students per year, have been the seed for a new and ongoing Erasmus+ KA229 project where during three years 22 European students per year participate in a two-month- long-term mobility. Finally, the general cooperation amongst partners in this project has turned out to be so positive that most of the participating schools are already cooperating to submit a new proposal for another strategic partnership for 2020.