Inspired by Health is a two-year collaborative project carried out by Alppilan lukio (Helsinki, Finland), Bischöfliche Gymnasium (Graz, Austria), Nuestra Señora del Pilar (Valencia, Spain) and Gymnasieskolan Vipan (Lund, Sweden). The project has its origin in the growing concern of the students’ physical and mental well-being and its impact on their academic performance. The studies in all participating countries show alarming results in these fields. Therefore we decided to offer students ideas of how to improve their well-being. As a consequence, we expect to see rise in their academic results. We have divided the theme “health” into four different sections: nutrition, physical exercise, mental health and active citizenship. The underlying idea is to start by making an individual student feel healthy by introducing him/ her healthy food, exercising and making sure that stress doesn’t get the most of the student. When the individual is balanced both physically and mentally, he/ she can help others (by being an active citizen) and thus pay it forward in society. All in all, when the students are balanced, their self-esteem improves and they are able to set themselves higher goals in school and at work. The four participating schools will all choose 30 students for the whole project, which adds up to 120 students and ca. 10-15 teachers taking part in the project. The students are all upper secondary students aged 16-20. Even though the schools have the same problem with students not paying enough attention their health, we have different kind of backgrounds, resources and knowhow in the field. Therefore it will be interesting to compare the methods and learn from each other. In addition, we will also have specialist organizations involved in all these meetings. The project will last two years and there will be a project meeting every semester, in which we will go through the material the students have prepared and produced during that semester. There will also be lectures, field trips and workshops on that certain topic. Apart from the 40-60 “core” students participating the meeting, we also aim at enabling the whole host school take part in the programme in a minor scale by attending a lecture or participating a workshop etc. We will organize at least one Skype meeting between the project meetings, where students get to discuss the future theme. Our project will start with a meeting in Helsinki autumn 2017 and the theme is healthy food. The students will for instance learn what kind of food is considered healthy in these four countries, how to cook healthy snacks with a low budget and how to diminish food waste. The second meeting will take place in Graz spring 2018 with the theme sports. The students get to try out many different kinds of sports and present sports that are typical to their countries. The third meeting will be held in Valencia autumn 2018 with the theme mental health. The students will get to take part in different workshops that aim at improving mental well-being, eg. laughter therapy, mindfulness, music workshop,learning cooperation by attending escape room and many more. Our last meeting will take place in Lund in spring 2019 with the topic feeling good about helping others - active citizenship. The students get to know several volunteering organizations and also try out voluntary work. Our guiding methods are authentic learning, inclusive learning and using ICT as a tool for learning. We want to give our students real authentic experiences and instead of multiple lectures, we want them to try things on their own. This has been a crucial value when planning the meetings. Even though we teachers have drawn the guidelines for the programme, we want to promote inclusive learning, and have, thus, deliberately left the more detailed planning for our students so that they also here get to be active instead of just passively carry out the programme that we have planned. This gives them the opportunity to dig into the subject more profoundly and really think about what is important and what they feel we need to emphasise. In addition, they learn how to take responsibility and plan projects with dozens of people. Since the meetings take place only twice a year, we need to use ICT to communicate and prepare and share material. We will help our students become fluent in making PowerPoints/ Prezis, using GoogleForms, GoogleDocs, and Excel. We believe that the students’ academic prowess will improve when they are conscious of the facts that can influence their health, which then enables them to make smarter choices. This, in consequence, helps them to manage their lives better. This is especially important for the students with lower economic backgrounds, where families often don’t have the resources or knowhow to support their children to make healthy decisions. The impact of the project doesn’t just limit to the academic results. Instead, there are underlying impacts that are significant.
Inspired by Health was a two-year project by Alppilan lukio (Helsinki, Finland), Bischöfliche Gymnasium (Graz, Austria), Nuestra Señora de Pilar (Valencia, Spain) and Gymnasieskolan Vipan (Lund, Sweden). The project was created out of concern of the students’ physical and mental well-being and its effect on their academic achievements, and we wished to cut the school dropout rate. The main purpose of the project was to make the students more aware of the factors affecting their health, thus helping them to achieve better study results. The topics were nutrition, sports, mental health and active citizenship. These factors form a circle: when you eat healthy, do sports and are mentally balanced, you have the strength and the willingness to help others and to be active in society. Also, being balanced improves the students’ self-esteem and they are able to set themselves higher goals in school. We included as many students (aged 16-20) in the project as possible. The total number of students actively working in the project was ca. 100. In addition, 20-30 teachers worked for the project. We collaborated with numerous non-school organisations, companies and parties during every meeting: specialised lecturers, sports clubs, voluntary organisations etc. We also included our own schools (ca 4000 students) and even primary schools and disabled children in the program by organising them events. The project was built to have one semester working with a specific theme. We started with nutrition in fall 2017 (Helsinki), followed by physical exercise in spring 2018 (Graz), mental health in fall 2018 (Valencia) and the final topic was active citizenship in spring 2019 (Lund). The content of the meeting was, in short, following: in Helsinki, the students learned eg. how to build a healthy diet. In Graz, the students got to try out many different kinds of sports and present sports that are typical to their countries. The theme of the third meeting in Valencia was mental health. The students took part in different workshops that aimed at improving mental well-being, eg. laughter therapy, mindfulness and learning cooperation by attending escape room. Our last meeting was in Lund with the topic active citizenship. The students got to know several voluntary organizations and the previous three topics were also combined in the program. During the different meetings the students also wrote multilingual glossaries on nutrition/ cooking, sports and voluntary work. Though the meetings only lasted a week in each country, we worked with the core groups long before and after them. This involved eg. conducting surveys, preparing videos, organizing workshops for other students, listening to lectures and presenting the project to others - the schools, other schools, in the media (tv, newspapers, teachers’ unions’ magazine) etc. After each meeting, the participating students answered a feedback survey about the week, and so we were able to monitor the benefits. According to the results, the students now know more about a healthy way of living and they feel that the project has increased their knowledge on eg. healthy nutrition and its effect on their bodies. Overall, the student feedback was highly positive as for the informative part of the project as well as the project and its activities overall. The students have gained cultural and social capital due to spending a week in a foreign family and working with others in different countries. Their language and ICT skills have also improved and their self-esteem has increased and they are less afraid of giving a presentation in a foreign language. We have involved not only the students of our four schools but also primary school students and disabled children in form of workshops and beneficiary events. Our schools have organised eg. a sports event for disabled and primary school children as well as a “preparing healthy snack” session for primary school children. Also, all schools organised an event for voluntary work eg. gathering toys for children seeking asylum, a soup kitchen and in Lund, the whole school worked to collect as much money as possible to the Music Help, which has now distributed these to those in need in Kenya and Lebanon. The project has actively been presented in various media and the participants have also kept our schools well aware of how the project is proceeding. The project has been in a few newspapers, in the Finnish teachers’ unions’ magazine and also on TV in Spain. We were also invited to tell about our project in a national Erasmus+ meeting in Helsinki. On school level we have used Instagram, Facebook, school blogs and morning assemblies to inform other students and teachers. The teachers involved have also learned a lot from each other. We now have a better insight on how things are done in other schools/ countries and our ICT and organising skills have improved. All in all, we have had a great group, which has worked very well together.