Teaching in Europe: Freshwater Crisis

Project summary

Competences support learning and problem solving. They make people more capable of acting and enable them for independent learning. The number of pupils who have difficulties in understanding texts and expressing their point of view and who are therefore less successful at school increases. Some of them get frustrated and leave school education earlier than necessary. Language competence is the precondition for acquiring knowledge and media competence. It develops the abilities to articulate and share ideas, to communicate, to reflect and connect old and new knowledge. It is the foundation for acquiring more competences and for seizing opportunities. Language competence is a forceful communication tool and supports intercultural competences. We are worried that it gets more and more difficult for our pupils to make their own experiences and to be creative. Creative competence is important in our increasingly versatile world. Being able to perceive the world in new ways, to make new connections and generate solutions helps build your own experiences, develop as an independently minded and autonomous person who does not just adopt and use other’s patterns of thought and action. We need more ideas how we can help our pupils to improve these competences. When teachers from different schools and countries meet to get more insight how teaching is done at other schools, when they discuss their observations and exchange their experience we will gain new ideas how to approach the current deficits. But just acquiring competences is not enough to make qualified decisions and to assess actions. That is why we will be working on improving the competences while gaining science knowledge. Our pupils know that we have a problem with global warming, but they do not know that the increasing shortage of freshwater worldwide will become an even bigger problem - not only for our environment but also for our society and the manhood as a whole. Only 2,5% of all existing water on earth is freshwater. During the last 100 years, worldwide the consumption of freshwater decupled, the supply of freshwater from the ground constantly declines, conflicts get worse and the depicted consequences are frightening. That is why we want our pupils to know more about the topic of freshwater, understand its value and treat water mindfully. Six schools will be partners. Coordinating institute is Stadtteilschule Arheilgen (Darmstadt/Germany), a cooperative comprehensive for age 10-16. Zakladni skola T.G. Masaryka (Blansko/Czech Republic) provides elementary education for age 6-15, private comprehensive Drita (Sofia/Bulgaria) offers primary and secondary education for age 7-18, Scoala Primara ‘Hänsel und Gretel’ (Iasi/Romania) is a preschool for age 3-6 and a primary for age 6-11, Vali Sabahattin Cakmakoglu Ortaokulu (Mersin/Turkey) is a secondary for age 11-15, Roteberg skola (Edsbyn/Sweden) is a primary for age 6 to 12 and has a preschool class. The schools vary in size, their location within Europe and the number of pupils from families of different cultural and social background and economic status. Their catchment areas differ from a more rural environment to large cities. They are located in different types of landscape, climate zones and cultural environments. In order to improve our pupils’ competences, their knowledge about freshwater, make them responsible in acting and thinking in a transnational frame, we will elaborate activities dealing with words, proverbs & pieces of wisdom related to water, water footprints & contaminating freshwater, freshwater biotopes & rivers being lifelines, water cycles, reports about life in water stressed areas, legends & fairy tales, the European Water Framework Directive, forces of water & virtual water and more. Our pupils will translate into English, will compare results, prepare collages, posters, exhibitions, graphical charts, guidelines & presentations, drawings & warning signs, make presentations & ad-lib, build a Freshwater Wiki, create picture stories, world maps & games, play games, participate in an awareness raising actions & competitions, write articles, have discussions and explain how things work, prepare stations for learning with experiments and self-made models, demonstrate and explain processes to visitors, discuss strategies and plan implementation, etc . Our final guide called “Teaching in Europe: Freshwater Crisis – acquiring competences and science knowledge” will collect all reports about the activities and more information in English as online edition and folder for quick reference for our teacher libraries. Inter alia our pupils will become more confident and will actively participate in class work, perform better at school, be more open-minded when coping with new situations. Their critical thinking as well as the ability to judge and looking ahead will have improved. Thereby they will have more opportunities to master an active and satisfying life in future.