"MAS(S)KE - Dive into language and culture with all senses" is a Strategic School Partnership project that brings together three language teaching institutions from Gelsenkirchen (Germany), Sofia (Bulgaria) and Felgueiras (Portugal). All in all, around ione hundred students and teachers will play an active role in the project, hundreds more will benefit from its outcomes. Our project is innovative, because we provide accsess to a variety of cultural events and thereby acquaint students with new memorising techniques. For the first time in our project history an intense focus is set on students with litle or no school background as integrative part of the heterogenous group of participants. An effective motivation to learn German as a second or foreign language is fostered by the multi-sense approach of the project activities, thus enhancing the chances of integration into society for the German students and putting forward career opportunities for the Bulgarian and the Portuguese students as well as for the German future educators in the group. Songwriting and performing, drama writing and staging, sculpturing, cooking and baking together, creating leisure and sports activities or supply to an all-sense language acquisition process and enable the participating students to literally dive into the German language and culture. A "suitcase" filled with the outcomes of the project activities provides a sustaining product which can be used for learning in the participants´ groups and in further language classes. The three priorities of our project are: - to promote an open and innovative education by using new ways of acquiring a foreign or second language: students leave the foreign language classroom and open their mind to activities outside the regular school routine. They respect other students and their different life realities and gain an insight into the cultural history and current cultural habits of Germany. International mobilities unite those students in a common goal to achieve a better language knowledge and create material for further learning in the participants´ group as well as in other language classes. Traditional and digital ways of learning are used. - to provide support to schools, fighting truancy, early school-leaving and the linked disadvantages: participating students are effectively motivated to improve their knowledge in the foreign or second language. They see more importance to their learning than they would if they just stayed in the classroom. By crossing national and cultural boundaries, language learning becomes a part of their daily life. - to promote social integration: the active participants of the project are better integrated into the society of the country they (now) live in, even though a large group, namely that of the refugees, has so far been excluded from most of the cultural events. The project covers all aspects of a modern approach to language learning, as well as European awareness, responsibilities, and personal development of the participants.
"MAS(S)KE - Dive into language and culture with all senses" was both title and topic of each of all in all six short time exchange meetings of students during the project. Around 105 students of the three partner institutions, Berufskolleg Königstraße in Gelsenkirchen (Germany), 73. SU ″Vladislav Gramatik“ in Sofia (Bulgaria), and Escola Secundária com 3° ciclo do Ensino Básico de Felgueiras in Felgueiras (Portugal), took part in those exchange meetings and benefited from the events intended to approach multiple senses at places outside the foreign language classroom. Thus, an open and innovative way of teaching and acquiring the German language was provided for all those participating in the project. All participants from the three partner institutions had in common that they had learned German as a foreign or as a second language. The individual prerequesites differed among the groups of students. The participants from Germany had been living in German for a maximum of two years and had been learning German since the time of their arrival in Germany only when they joined the project. In so called “International classes” which they attended, a majority of those participants had become acquainted with a fixed daily routine for the first time in their lives. Some of the students still struggled with adapting to that daily routine. On the opposite, the Bulgarian as well as the Portuguese participants had had a long experience in learning German as a foreign language in their home countries. However, most of them had not had the chance to meet native speakers of German before; in the project MAS(S)KE that was clearly a point the benefited from. Apart from the students taking part in the exchange meetings, all in all approximately one hundred more students were involved in the project by preparing and evaluating the exchange meetings. Especially through the presentations of the project’s results, an opportunity was given to that group of students to discover the German language a little closer than it is possible in the regular classroom. Some content of the project programme is listed here: writing of a project song and performing it on several events throughout the course of the project; writing a theatre play and acting it out on stage in front of a real audience; events with a culinary or a sportive background, and a project week devoted to fine arts all were intended to provide the participants with a good dive into the German language – and succeeded in doing so. During the last meeting of the project, the “suitcase” with the outcomes of the project activities was finally packed. Students who took part in this procedure not only checked out whether the digitalized and the analogue material was complete, but they also went through the complete project process again in quick motion. That served as a mirror for them in which they could discover their own individual learning progress from the beginning of the project until its end. Apart from learning the German language, the participants had an insight into different life realities and thus were supported in developing an understanding or more understanding for different situations of/in life. The students from Germany which were still trained in following their daily school routine, showed a high level of responsibility in the project and showed up regularly. Truancy was fought effectively not only for the course of the project, as the continuity in attending lessons seems to stay on with those students. Everybody’s motivation to learn the German language was tempted more effectively by getting the chance to discover the language with all senses than it would have been possible in the regular classroom settings. Social integration for the participants of the project was promoted, as all participants had the chance to join cultural events. Many of the participating students got into contact with theatre for the first time of their lives; thanks to the fact that the students themselves became actors and actresses in their play instead of simply consuming a ready play, it was possible that this formerly strange world of theatre became part of the natural surrounding. The project covered all aspects of a modern approach to language learning, as well as European awareness, responsibilities, and personal development of the participants.