All over Europe we are witnessing a struggle for identity. This refers to our entire continent, particular countries and sometimes to nations making them up. The struggle for identity, however, has no grounds unless basic transmission of experience between generations takes place. The experience we gained while working on photography as a tool will now help us use photography as a vehicle connecting generations on a local scale and in the longer run countries on a larger, cross-national and cross-cultural scaleThose we will soon take over the responsibility of managing the whole world will have more insight on what it is all about and in the first place they will employ know better what it ‘should’ be like. Our teenagers by all means need to read the books of life written by their ancestors to find out what the most important things are. They will realize what Europe looked like when we did not work together. They will also learn how families all over Europe used to overcome hardship by relying on each other. If they manage to draw the conclusions that we can compare countries to family members, maybe the future of Europe will no longer be painted in dark colours. Maybe the memories will simply keep us together. We can see several clear goals ahead of us and we are confident this project will let us reach them. In the first place, comparing the information flow between generations will convince all participants that it is a universal value disregarding the boundaries of states or nations. Eradication of national differences will in turn help us break stereotypes of nations and age groups still common in our countries. A joint enterprise of same family members will have its local effect on families and by all means will strengthen the bonds there. Not only will it improve the way we understand one another, but by discovering what value the older may have for the younger and the other way round, our self-esteem might get a boost, too. Engaging the young and the old will certainly have another impact – the juvenile will get more engaged and the elderly will no longer feel redundant. Needless to say our local communities will benefit from it, no matter the scale – social exclusion is a global problem anyway. Moreover, we do hope that some new relationships will be established. Both on a local scale as well as international. Finally, we are certain that collecting memories of the older generations will lead the participants to a conclusion that life used to be much harder and more challenging in the pre-EU times, especially in the countries from the eastern and middle Europe. It is of critical importance now in the times of such strong anti-EU movements all over our continent. To sum it up, we can expect following goals to be achieved: 1- Showing its participants common benefits,2.Promoting a civic European society 3- Preventing social exclusion .4.-Prevent isolation because of age 5-Engaging at least two generations not bound by family,6-Leading to mutual understanding between the old and the youngs,6. Increasing self-esteem of both groups, 7 Helping to solve local problems-8 Developing interpersonal relationships 9-Strengthening our local communities,10-Creating new international bonds and strengthening the already existing ones,11Promoting a civic European society 12-Motivating the learners to use their foreign languages by giving them authentic tasks to complete requiring L2 (and/or L3) skills. 13- Engage all age groups in the use of IT skills to improve their digital competence.We believe this project is worth doing on the international scale for the following reasons: 1-4. We will give our students opportunities to use their foreign language so that they will see that it opens the door not only to take tests and exams.2-2. We will exchange our experience to combat the social exclusion as this problem is unfortunately universal,3-1. We will demonstrate how similar our societies are in terms of generation gap and therefore how we can work together to narrow it. 4- 3. We will prove that the positive impact of the European Union is unquestionable as a number of countries have enjoyed benefits of being a member.
"Memories" took an action-oriented approach to inter-generational feedback. Students were required to take their cameras and go out and observe the world of the elderly around them in order to look for connections between the learning contents addressed in different school subjects like History, Foreign Languages, Mother Tongue, Arts, ICT, Music, Physical Education and vocational studies (Marketing, Economics,- coordinator's students helped to organise our final mobilityin Mataró) and the reality around them. The camera and the photograph was turned into a support of the learning process. Students expressed concepts and ideas studied in their classes into photos. The most important point was the interaction between the elderly and the different activities that they could show and teach our young students and our students and their digital way to embrace the world and life as well. It's been really interesting to discuss both ways to understand TIME. Time for our elderly and for our teenagers. The project promoted intercultural interaction, increasing the awareness of other European cultural and linguistic features. The contact with a multiplicity of diverse cultures was a source of cultural enrichment fostering the development of a spirit of openness towards different cultures for a genuine understanding and sharing of European diversity by establishing an empathic relationship among teachers and students from different European countries. This contact with the experience of mobility promoted social cohesion and intercultural dialogue. As the project was based on teamwork, collaboration, communication in the mother tongue and foreign languages, the use of ICT, all participants' participation in the planning and evaluation of the project, the improvement of learning outcomes in Key Competences, the experience of living in the host country during the mobilities, the promotion of students’ autonomy and the adoption of new learning methods addressed the eight lifelong learning key competences defined by the European Reference Framework