Europe and the EU have been facing a lot of challenges lately: the refugee crisis, the Brexit, the election of Trump and the rise of populism and thus many other current issues may be left behind and therefore, we, schools from Finland, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Italy and Greece feel that it is time to fight intolerance and ignorance of environmental and social issues. With this background we have developed an Erasmus+ project with the title “Youth for Europe - Agenda 2017-2019”. The two-year- project is about the challenges young people face, with themes that are currently interesting to students, e.g. youth unemployment, situation of minorities, gender equality, food loss, environmental problems or human rights so that the young people are able to form their own sustainable development agenda with a focus on environment and society. Objectives We feel that it is of utmost importance to enable young people to become active citizens, tolerant, open-minded and to acquire knowledge, language, ICT, project work, interaction skills, learn to organize things and be self-organised, develop mutual understanding, learn about other European cultures, become active European citizens that know how to express their opinion in a solution-focused way. Other objectives are to strengthen the teaching profession, exchange good practices and new methods among teachers and to integrate them into lessons. They will become more motivated, committed and will use more student-oriented and innovative teaching methods. Also the teachers will improve their language, ICT, management skills and are more ready to interact internationally which will reflect on their attitudes. Profile of participants All 6 participating schools have different backgrounds, but all have teachers with a wide experience. The work and responsibilities are divided between the partners. Moreover, each school hosts a meeting, thus many more people are involved such as other members and students inside the school, families, local community, different organisations and companies. Therefore, the aims of the project will be spread widely. Activities and results We will have both transnational project meetings (TPM) and LTTs. Most TPMs are at the same time as LTTs. On the one hand the TPMs aim at strengthening the teaching profession by giving teachers a chance to monitor lessons, take part in workshops, get to know other education systems and to discuss strong and weak points with colleagues. On the other hand the LTTs aim at the students enabling them to interact, and give them a chance to promote the agenda and do project work face-to-face with their European peers. Besides, the students learn, while living in host families, about different cultures, how young people their age live, what their interests are and discover that although they live far away from each other that they have the same hopes and fears. Both of them are important for the implementation and success of the project. The students will do their project work between the LTTs and will compare and present those at LTTs, at which they deepen their knowledge on the subjects in workshops and visiting places, companies and talk to experts. They will also acquire skills in organising events to promote our agenda. Some of the tangible results are: our agenda, logo, news bulletins, videos, articles, explainities, vocabulary, quizlets, Earth Hour event, questionnaires, interviews, posters, calendar, panel talks etc. Ways of communicating with all the partners will be email, during the meetings and through Twin Space. All the results will be published and shared on the created project’s homepage as well as on eTwinning and on the Erasmus+ site. Impact and long term benefits The project will enhance the knowledge and awareness of the topics and makes the participants aware of their own responsibility. The participants will become more active, motivated, and have a broader knowledge and network. Their hard and soft skills will improve. The school environment will get more open-minded and European. The project will help to fulfil the goals of the curriculum, as it integrates different subjects and many relevant topics such as sustainability, internationalism, entrepreneurship etc. Teachers develop and improve teaching skills and are willing to try new approaches. They will swap lesson materials and best practices. The goals and the skills acquired in the project are vital for the future work life. The impacts on direct participants will spread into the community and we hope to spread the message of our agenda as widely as possible. Next to the content related themes we would like to promote the European idea and to underline the necessity of working closely with a mutual understanding together to keep up a unified, powerful and functioning European Union to overcome intolerance, populism, political, social crises and to strengthen our responsibility towards other people and the environment.
Europe and the EU had faced a lot of challenges in recent years: the refugee crisis, the Brexit, the rise of populism and thus many other current issues were left behind and therefore we, schools from Finland, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Italy and Greece felt that it was time to fight intolerance and ignorance of environmental and social issues. With this background we developed an Erasmus+ project with the title “Youth for Europe - Agenda 2017-2019”. The two-year- project was about the challenges young people face, with themes that were currently interesting to students, e.g. youth unemployment, situation of minorities, gender equality, food loss, environmental problems or human rights. The students formed their own sustainable development agenda with a focus on environment and society in the first meeting, and we dealt with the topics further in the project meetings and in the tasks between the meetings. Our objective was to enable young people to become active citizens, tolerant, open-minded and to acquire knowledge, language, ICT, project work, interaction skills, learn to organize things and be self-organised, develop mutual understanding, learn about other European cultures, become active European citizens that know how to express their opinion in a solution-focused way. In many ways we succeeded in this. It was an absolute pleasure to see the students work together in international groups, being active and trying to make a difference. Other objectives were to strengthen the teaching profession, exchange good practices and new methods among teachers and to integrate them into lessons. This was done through TPMs, where teachers had workshops on various themes and each country's school system, had a possibility to job shadow different lessons, had pedagogical cafes and teacher meetings where organisational matters were discussed. Many of the participating teachers were first-timers and they became more motivated, committed, and improved their language, IT, management skills. They became more ready to interact internationally, and many of them will want to continue working on international projects in the future. All 6 participating schools had different backgrounds. The work and responsibilities were divided between the partners in the first TPM. The first TPM was a really good start of the project: we could deal with all the organisational challenges, set up the timetable of the meetings, make different forms, decide on ground rules, divide the tasks and get to know each other. It was very easy to start the project with the students after that, because we had already given each other good advice eg. on different ways to choose the students Each school hosted a meeting, thus many more people were involved such as other members and students inside the school, families, local community, different organisations and companies. We had both transnational project meetings (TPM) and LTTs. Most TPMs were at the same time as LTTs. TPMs aimed at strengthening the teaching profession by giving teachers a chance to monitor lessons, take part in workshops, get to know other education systems and to discuss strong and weak points with colleagues. The aim of the LTTS was to give students possibilities to interact, and give them a chance to promote the agenda and do project work face-to-face with their European peers. The students learned about different cultures, how young people their age live, what their interests were, and what differences and similarities there were in their lives. Both TPMs and LTTs were important for the implementation and success of the project. The students did their project work between the LTTs and then compared and presented those at LTTs, at which they deepened their knowledge on the subjects in workshops. They acquired a vast set of skills. Some of the tangible results were: our agenda, logo, news bulletins, videos, articles, explainities, vocabulary, quizlets, Earth Hour event, questionnaires, interviews, posters, calendar, panel talks etc.We communicated mostly via e-mails or whatsapp, eTwinning, and sometimes we skyped. The communication between the coordinators was very good. Most of the results were published and shared on the project’s homepage https://eerasmuspluss.wixsite.com/agenda17-19 and on the Erasmus+ project results site. The project enhanced the knowledge and awareness of the topics. The participants became more active, motivated and widened their network. Their hard and soft skills improved. The project helped to fulfill the goals of the curriculum, as it integrated different subjects and many relevant topics such as sustainability, internationalism, entrepreneurship etc. Teachers developed and improved language skills and had a lot of possibilities to discuss best practices. The coordinators feel they now have the know-how to run European projects, as this project was run very openly and thus can be used as an example for future projects.