The second decade of the 21st century confronts The European Union with unprecedented challenges. New threats: the immigration crisis, risk of terrorist attacks, uncertainty about member states leaving the organisation, challenges to the idea of further integration and to European solidarity itself posed by populist political movements in some member states as well as the resulting anti-European resentment add to the old and as-yet unresolved issues: massive migration, environment destruction and rising inequality within the global perspective.EFT, Europeans for Fair Trade, a 2-year project encompassing 4 European secondary schools from Poland, Scotland, Spain and Sweden, is a way of addressing some of these worrying phenomena. Individuals from four totally different cultural backgrounds are going to meet in order to research and discuss the topic of Fair Trade and how it can help to deal with the above problems. Each of the schools has got experience and competences in different areas, which is going to be beneficial for the EFT project. Scotland will bring their Fair Trade awareness and enthusiasm, Spain will spread their international orientation and rich experience concerning international projects, Sweden will strengthen the links between the world of business and education while Poland will bring their expertise in researching the issues of equity and sustainable development as well as enthusiasm for using ICT in teaching. In this way the participants are all going to contribute to the European targets and the exchange of good practices. The choice of priorities (HORIZONTAL: Improve achievement in relevant and high-level basic and transversal competences in a lifelong learning perspective and SECTORAL: School education - Strengthening the profile of the teaching professions) started with the need analysis in the participating schools. The involved teachers, although working in different cultural backgrounds, agreed that there are particular needs which are similiar in all of them. Improving competences of both teachers and students for the needs of the 21st century include an attempt to jointly address the following challenges: applying a more personalised approach to teaching/learning, providing better quality teaching, responding to cultural diversity, preparing young people to be responsible EU citizens with fundamental values such as equity, sustainable development, peace, tolerance and diversity in mind, integration of ICT into the teaching/learning process. The main topics addressed by the project are: EU citizenship and awareness, new technologies as well as new innovative educational methods. The methodology applied in the course of the project will focus on the constructivist approach to education which is based on the assumption that individuals construct their own understanding and make sense of the world on the basis of their experience and interaction with others.By enabling teenage students from four different backgrounds to jointly visit and analyse the specific challenges facing local communities in those disparate locations and contexts as well as by confronting them with the ideals behind the Fair Trade movement, the project aims to equip all its participants with skills and competences necessary to deal with the challenges outlined above.As for the students, the necessity to cooperate in transnational groups will allow them to upgrade their language and intercultural skills as well as to overcome their potential preconceptions and prejudices, an exposure to Fair Trade practices will raise their awareness of the need for solidarity, sustainable development and ecological awareness, analysing the practical aspects of the business operations of the outlets visited and discussed which will enhance their problem-solving ability, while the demand that post-meeting outcomes (presentations, posters, leaflets, videos) are produced in an engaging and interactive form will increase both their creativity and their ICT skills, all of which will lead to empowering them as active and conscious Europeans who can and hopefully will disseminate their newly acquired competences and abilities among their families, schools and future employers.The teachers participating in the project will benefit by upgrading their ability to run and organise complex, international events, they will be made to integrate ICT into their daily teaching practice, they will have more opportunity to share their experience with CLIL methodology, thus upgrading their general professional competence, which will also profit the schools they work for and their private career-paths. Achieving the targets will have a positive effect on its participants' lives, schools, local communities and, thus on Europe. With the project's aid, they will be better equipped to actively engage with the present and future challenges, developing a model of a more equitable, conscious and responsible European society in the future.
The original plan was for the project to connect four schools from four different EU countries and give the representatives of each of them an opportunity to cooperate with a broad spectrum of student and teacher communities form other European countries. Unfortunately, on resignation of the Scottish partner the Project had to be run by only three of the original participants: ZSO Nr 12, II LO im. Gen. Zamoyskiej i H. Modrzejewskiej from Poland, IES Ribeira do Louro from Spain and Sven Eriksonsgymnasiet from Sweden. Despite the change and all the logistic rearrangements it entailed as well as the inevitable depletion of the intercultural variety among the participants, the main aims of the project have been fully realised. Among the key ones were: 1) to familiarize the project participants with the activity, mission and the on-the-ground operating reality of the Fair Trade movement and on this basis: 1.1 to foster conscious consumer attitudes, taking into account the impact of individual and collective decisions made at the checkout on the natural environment, preservation of local traditions, the situation of local producers and the standard of living of people living in developing countries; 1.2 to raise awareness of the functioning of market mechanisms; 1.3 to support active and conscious social involvement among project participants 2) to stimulate broadly understood cooperation between project participants (both students and teachers) both during exchanges and project meetings as well as during preparations and coordination of project activities at the individual school level, and on this basis: 2.1 to dispell prejudices and build teamworking skills, in particular in intercultural groups; 2.2 to improve language skills 2.3 to improve competences related to the use of new technologies; 2.4 to exchange innovative educational tools between teachers involved in the project. These objectives were most intensely focused upon during the preparation and implementation of inter-school visits, where teachers, students and families of pupils from abroad had to meet numerous organizational, coordination, intercultural and other challenges (detailed descriptions of meetings in Porriño, Borås and Poznań are available below). The total project activities have positively influenced the attitudes to sustainable and ethical consumption, cultural differences, level of language skills and motivation to further improve them among all Project participants and many people from their communities. They also enhanced their ability to use ICT tools both in the field of education and in other fields - from practical skills such as searching for flights and hotels abroad, through posting documents from different locations in a single and shared online repository (cloud) / creating a website and a blog, and devising interactive teaching materials, to the ability to critically analyze various Internet sources and even to create animated cartoons.