Europe, our Shared Home as a partnership arises from the current European paradox acknowledgment by the partner schools and from their wish to contribute, within their reach, to the formulation of a new narrative for Europe, as it was urged by the European Commission.On the one hand, Europe is going through a crisis, and we watch its evidences every day; on the other hand, Europe is still seen as a transnational success story, with capacity to attract masses of migrants from elsewhere.To cope with this paradox, at school level, we need to work in a new concept of European citizenship that, far from erasing regional identities and cultures, has to renew our interest for our regional traditions, under the scope of the humanities, the social sciences and the arts, but just to place it in perspective along with other regional identities and cultures. We also want to promote awareness to ongoing phenomena in Europe, like the migrants’ issues and to cope with the school failure and early leave within each school.To do so, we, the partnerschools from France, Poland, Greece and Portugal, define a set of clusters common to all the partners – in fact, to all Europeans – to research about within each school and to compare with all the schools in the partnership: Democracy, Migrations, the Age of Discoveries, the World War II and Regional Identities. Moreover, we allocate to each school in the partnership the deepening of one of this clusters, which will be the subject of our transnational teaching and learning activities as well as the subject of our research and presentations in school work.Those educational activities will be based on J. Dewey’s progressivism and will search for curricular relevance, both in subjects as in methodologies. Therefore, the research and the results will combine the utilization and production of digital and interactive resources, like films, quizzes, tour guides, presentations, art performances, with the investment in local assets like world heritage sites, oral traditions and local cultural events that will thus became relevant for our students, instead of mere designations.Like this we will have more motivated students, thus helping the schools to cope better with school failure and early leave, and better citizens for an after-paradox Europe.By making relevant local history, sites and culture, the project will promote local synergies between schools and local authorities, building local partnerships for the future.
At the end of our two-year project, our partnership is proud to acknowledge how far we've reached and how much we have accomplished in our journey together. We set out to help build a new narrative for Europe with very different schools around our continent. We come from very different contexts : two partner schools work as a boarding school and have special needs students, one partner is an experimental high school and one partner is a public primary and high school with an integration class for students with special needs. We have different social backgrounds and problems, we have different approaches to educational goals and we all have very different pupils. However, we found out we could get along very well together and produce outstanding work in very different formats. We've established a strong and effective communication system, with several online meetings, meeting protocols, and time-management tools, all of them thoroughly and consistently used throughout the project. At the first TPM in France, we designed what we believed were the best strategies to implement our project. We assigned each of the four main cluster themes to each partner school and we mapped the World Heritage assets we could mobilize for this project. Each school creatively approached its cluster theme and in every TTLA our students got successively familiarized with Migrations, World War II, Discoveries, and Democracy and Liberty. Plus, all our students produced a lot of research on each of the clusters and learned how to use a wide range of learning tools from drama plays to online apps. They came to realize how the same concept can have different historical approaches depending on the country, being notwithstanding part of the same European history. Our students also got in contact with several landmarks in Western Civilization, from the Acropolis to Auschwitz, which they would not know otherwise. By getting exposed to this kind of subjects, from different perspectives, we believe our students (some of which have never left their hometown) developed a sharper sense of European citizenship. Furthermore, our students developed a diverse set of competencies, from communication, teamwork and cooperation, critical thinking and creativity, thus adding new skills to school curricula as recommended by up-to-date educational research. The sound results from this project can be used to measure its success: we have produced a multinational poetry book, an international website, an eTwinning page, several online quizzes using interactive and appealing new apps (Kahoot, Socrative, etc), several exhibitions at all partner schools, dissemination events in each partner school on Europe Day, International Meetings with national authorities in two different countries (Portugal and Poland) and an extensive ensemble of artwork, from drawings, to graffities, drama play, short movies and posters. All the schools in the partnership agreed in carrying this partnership into the future. A new Erasmus+ project was submitted for the 2018-2020 period and is currently pending approval.