Our collaboration started months ago on Etwinning. We agreed to work together on waste management and biodiversity thanks to this project entitled "How sustainable is my school?". We decided to join our efforts to create ecosystems and to reduce the problem of food, paper and energy waste in our schools through hands-on activities made by students. Thanks to this early contact, we communicated and anticipated aspects of this Erasmus+ project. The partner schools (France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Romania) selected a group of participants composed of mainstream, SEN and migrant students. Socially-mixed groups of students will participate to workshops, collaborate on a common project, communicate in English with European students, discover European cultures and promote the spirit of solidarity, of non-discrimination. Students and teachers with the collaboration of indirect participants to the project (school ancillaries, school administrations, environmental associations, regional officials, waste management organisations, and city councils) will contribute through in-class and out-of-class activities to make our respective schools waste-preventive, biowaste-effective, and energy-efficient, thanks to initial audits. The variety of participants and the diversity of planned activities foster the pragmatic, transversal, effective and sustainable aspects of the project. It enables everyone to practice and improve interpersonal and linguistic skills. Our common commitment to implement biodiversity and waste management locally will make our actions more visible on a European level. This transnational collaboration will also teach students techniques and gestures already used by European partners to influence and change their parents’ habits. During in-class activities, students will for instance compare data and make statistics from measures collected by reading meters (water, electricity consumption) or by weighing discarded food at the canteen. The partner schools' outcomes will be used to value the students' perseverance and efforts. This creative work will focus on sustainability within each school and will put into practice the students' solutions based on initial audits to manage waste within their own schools. Collaborative management thanks to school's ideas, objects created, workshops, will support the success of this project Thanks to this strategic partnership, European teachers will adopt an interdisciplinary approach to learn from each other (culturally, academically, linguistically, and educationally). This project will also improve horizontal collaboration with environmental associations and city councillors. Vertical cooperation will prove beneficial to the participating schools thanks to the guidance and material assistance from regional and educational organisations.
Floors littered with papers, the food discarded at the canteen, the lights still on in classrooms, the dripping taps and toilets are everyday examples that have prompted us to collaborate to reduce locally-generated waste and to raise awareness among students about the need to change their habits. Through this project entitled "How sustainable is my school? " the partner schools (France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Romania) decided to join forces to create ecosystems and reduce the problem of food, paper and water waste in our respective schools through hands-on activities carried out by the pupils. The variety of participants and the diversity of the planned activities favoured the pragmatic, transversal and sustainable aspects of the project. This innovative project brought together pupils aged 14 to 17 (mainstream, SEN and socially mixed). They were selected on their ability to discover the culture of their European counterparts, to promote a spirit of solidarity, to participate in workshops, to work together on themes, to minimise communication barriers. Pupils, teachers and partners (environmental associations, waste management organisations, regional and city councillors) contributed to making our respective schools sustainable in terms of waste and ecosystems. The results have enabled teachers to work on Etwinning and in interdisciplinarity. Our common commitment has made our actions more visible at a European level, has influenced students' habits at a school level. The students learned about waste management, circular economy and created reusable materials : ecosystems, recycled and upcycled objects. The mobilities enabled them to gain self-confidence when speaking, to create promotional posters together, to improve their interpersonal and linguistic skills thanks in particular to the exchange of text messages and the comparison of family contexts. These enriching experiences nourished reflection and encouraged the pupils to put into perspective their vision of a country, of a people and of an educational system different from their own.