Entitled « Think Different, Do Together», the project aims at changing three states of affairs.First, many pupils, and adults as well, neither understand nor know their European partners because of a lack of information on each country’s situation (whether it be news or debates going on) and because everyone is naturally likely to be ethno-centric and ethno-centered, with this tendency to think that other Europeans think like they do.Secondly, we have noticed that quite a few pupils have trouble using the English language and lack in self-confidence, which puts a break on their ability to communicate in this language. Last, but not least, many pupils wrongly think that they know how to handle ICT. This project therefore aims at improving this situation.Ethnocentricism will be set aside, as teams will be multi-cultural. This organisation will lead to more open-mindedness and pupils will be encouraged to face others and otherness via debates like bioethics or the status of women. Such work will be handled in English only, whether it is before the meetings, when teams are preparing for the debate, or disseminating results. Over the course of 2 years, we aim at impacting at least 2000 pupils. Some of them will be working together during the European meetings which will take place in turn in each partner’s country. These mobilities will include 64 pupils. Quite a lot of them have few opportunities. Indeed, all the partner schools welcome a lot of pupils who are facing some kind of exclusion or other. The project will be carried out by all partners and supervised by the coordinator who makes sure that it is working well, that the objectives are met, and that dissemination is efficient. Inner communication will involve ICT in order to be as efficient as may be, and will be accompanied by 2 transnational meetings at the beginning of each year. The aim of these early meetings is to start quickly and efficiently, then to correct some problems. This project is meant to revolve around 4 topic-related meetings that will be the highlights of the project. These meetings will be prepared in advance, and their results used afterwards. All the results will be published online. We will thereby be able to check the improvement of participants' linguistic and ICT skills. We should also witness changes in young people’s way of thinking. Hopefully, they will become less ethno-centered. More widely, we are also confident we will reach a larger number of pupils and parents thanks to dissemination activities.
This project was designed to allow European pupils and teachers to work together and share their opinions and points of view in order to have a better understanding of how diverse and complex Europe is. Our main objective was to make people feel European. We wanted them to become aware of how difficult it can be to communicate with a foreigner. This could be seen as what it means to be European and to develop a feeling of European citizenship. On a more pragmatic level, we also aimed at improving pupils’ proficiency in English, or at least, to improve their self-confidence when speaking. We also aimed at improving their ICT skills. Indeed, all the project unfolded in English and numerous modern ICT tools were used. Initially, the project had been designed for 5 countries. Unfortunately Portugal had to pull out because the school closed down. So in the end there were only 4 of us. The French were coordinating. Our partners were Italians, Polish and Greek. The Italians and the Poles were senior high school pupils while the Greeks were a junior high school. Our common point was that all or most of our pupils are socially or geographically challenged, whether they live in a very rural area, or in the mountains, or on an island. The project was designed in 4 parts. They all followed the same logic but tackled a different topic every time. The topics we selected were : women’s place in society (Italy), sustainable development (Poland), bioethics (France) and solidarities at the local, national, intra-European levels, and towards migrants (Greece). For each topic, the pupils, helped by their teachers, had to create an exhibition. This exhibition was meant to show what the state of affairs in each country was. There were 3 panels : one showed the national representation of the topic through a mind map, another showed what the law said regarding this topic and the last panel shed light on the current debates, limits and imperfections of the system. Meanwhile, the pupils had to brainstorm, think and implement a civic action related to the topic in their school. It could have been an information day, or giving out leaflets… The idea was the make the whole school aware of the problem, for example the place of women in society. This work ended on an actual meeting of pupils and teachers in a different country each time. We met for a week. During this work week, the national exhibitions were shown to all the partners (12 panels). We had pupils collect information and think about the situation in Europe. Each national team also presented the local civic project that had been carried out. Multinational teams (1 nationality by team) also shot videos to make the others think of the problem. These were shown at the end of the week. We thought that multinational teams were the only way to reach our objective of reaching to the other and communicating with them. Besides, pupils had to speak English if they wanted to communicate so this organisation guaranteed the use of English as a communication means. On the whole, we may say that this project has been successful, whether it be regarding the productions expected from the pupils (exhibitions, local projects, videos) or pupils’ skills improvement. They felt better equipped to get in touch with foreigners, they felt they had improved in English and in ICT. Some local projects are even meant to last in the school and beyond.