The project aims at using sport and especially football, its history and its practice throughout Europe, as a means to reinforce the link between the youth of the continent and to enhance their knowledge and abilities. Thereby, we want to rely on a topic, which is directly intelligible for teenagers and which provides opportunities to approach a large range of knowledge and skills. Indeed, if sport is, an obvious source of physical well-being, which enables to keep individuals in shape and maintain their health, its educational scope is much larger. Sport is also a vector of values such as respect, tolerance, solidarity, effort. It is a privileged means of conveying ethical behavior. Moreover, sport is a useful means of exchange which rallies people and facilitates contact beyond differences (linguistic for example). Besides, sport is a learning tool because it reflects the culture, the traditions and the historical background of a society. Finally, it is a relevant way to suggest innovating transversal pedagogical methods and represent an appropriate medium for new didactical techniques involving teachers for many disciplines (PE, Language, IT, History, Geography, Civic Education, Biology, Arts and craft, Music …).The project focuses on the most popular and the most practiced sport in Europe i.e. football. It is a collective sport and it relays the idea that work should be done together to be successful. Furthermore, as it is the dominant mass sport, it will be easier to reach and motivate the widest range of pupils. In addition, the massive sociological impact of football makes it a particularly valuable asset for studying and understanding the recent history of European countries and their continent. Thus, in this project, children from Europe will communicate together, improve their knowledge and increase their curiosity. Sport will be a common language for them, with which almost every kid is comfortable: it breaks up barriers and opens up the mind. Pupils will also discover the other countries and share their culture. They will learn from their differences and become aware of their common points. By playing together in the European team, they will experiment the importance of mutual and respected rules, joined effort, collaboration, excelling themselves, cohesion with teammates and esteem of the opponents. Besides, this project will help the pupils to understand the origins and the development of the E.U. The footballers who try to reach the same goal with different tasks and qualities are similar to the E.U. countries looking for cooperation despite their divergences. The first step of players in new teams can be linked to the progressive building of the European community. To summarize, in this project, pupils will discover how to learn and play, how to play fair and how to make fair play cross every border.
The Fairplay4EU project was an idea of the Pierre Valdo middle school, a French public school who wanted to go on with its European policy started in 2009. In addition to the two previous Comenius projects, we wanted to find a universal language which could allow the European pupils to develop civic, scholar and social skills in an easy and original way. After Esperanto and music, Sport - and more specifically football - was chosen for this project in order to discover the countries involved. It was also a way to bond on an academic point of view as well as on a social, interactive level; beyond borders and generations. « Fairplay» was the cornerstone as a spirit of responsability and ethics. We also wanted to show the pupils that beyond the trivial practice of sports or the consumption of it through media - especially in the case of mass entertaining sports- they are vectors of values and are important stakes in the world we are living in. Teachers and schools eventually benefited from it thanks to the pedagogically dynamic and project based approach. A partnership was built to complete the school’s network, insure the representativeness of all countries involved and use every partner’s skills and specific abilities. After a first failed attempt in 2015, the project was approved in 2016 with a partnership of 5: Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Lithuania and France. All were already used to European projects. The French coordinator had never worked with these countries except for Italy, though the school’s location - Sicily - was brand new and exotic. Some partners such as the Dutch had very specific and useful skills to provide (IT and arts). The final task was the creation of a «Fairplay Without Borders Guide» that would compile all the project’s realizations. We also created a «Multilingual Sport Dictionnary». It was articulated around five learning, teaching and training activities (one in each country). Each one of them made pupils work on themes related to sport and allowed them to mingle and blend in while developing their skills through the exchanges. The preparation of each exchange was the opportunity to work on various subjects with various materials (History and Geography, Languages, IT, Arts, PE, Sciences...). A website was also created by the Dutch school as the main communication tool. «Erasmus Corners» in each school branded them with a European touch and allowed us to communicate on the project as it went on. Two years after, all the objectives have been fullfilled and beyond (such as the final number of students involved in learning, teaching and training activities). The final production (Fairplay Guide) shows the variety and density of the activities. Diagnosis evaluations and feedback evaluations show obvious progress in basic Geography, knowledge about the E.U and in the relationship with languages - especially English. Self confidence, autonomy, curiosity - eventhough hard to quantify - have grown in pupils who are largely from poor, tough and/or isolated neighberhoods. Teachers also benefited a lot from this project: new pedagogical approaches, improvement through variety and confrontation to other schemes in and out of their workspace.The schools and the cities involved saw an improvement of their image. They are now fully and openly supporting The Erasmus policy. This project reinforced the international identity of the schools. This will keep going on thanks to new projects in progress and the newly inspired teachers working them.