The sources of this project is a learning activity in the regional museums and a technical application developed by students in a university college, together with the impact of a training program in our county council to encourage international cooperation. The learning activity uses the story of local Holocaust from WW2 to influence young persons to understand the connection between history and present times and to see how history affects our way of thinking and our ability to reflect on our own values and decisions. The learning activity needs to be improved and elaborated to get a stronger effect on target groups, hence the interest in applying a technical solution, and also to initiate a better cooperation between musesums and schools for the impact of learning activities. During the project we also want to build networks and gain experience in working in an international environment, to improve the quality of the services and education we normally offer. All institutions in the partnership have a public mandate of promoting democratic values, of combating radicalism, extremism and xenophobia, which are current European challenges. There are 8 partner organisations in the project; 2 museums, 3 upper secondary schools, 1 university college, 1 public body and 1 county administration's educational department, representing Norway, Sweden, Germany, Poland and Italy. Each partner sends 2 or 3 participants to 5 transnational meetings. The participants are teachers of history, heads of departments, curators and civil servants. There will mainly be 5 transnational meetings where all participants meet in each of the partner countries, to build confidence in each other, exchange good practices, work with ideas for teaching and learning materials and to develop the technical tool. We will work according to traditional project work methods, with shared responsibilities for tasks such as chairing group work, meetings and creating intellectual output. Some tasks will be tested on pupils in schools during the project life line, and in one meeting we invite pupils to take part as a reference group. The main result of the project will be an app to be used in teaching history or social science, linking the informal teaching by a museum to more formal learning in schools, using technology-assisted learning. This app will communicate with the sources, using local input which is transferable to other situations and challenges. Apart from that, our aim is to create a good relationship between the partners which will encourage more international work, encourage cross sectoral work, improve our professional competence and confidence in EU project work, and of course create more new teaching ideas to be used among pupils and students. Our work will affect the attitudes of people, such as the participants themselves and thereby our institutions, and this will improve our cultural understanding and reflection on what it means to be a part of Europe and how things are connected. It is extremely relevant to work actively to counteract radicalisation, anti-democratic currents and xenophobia and to learn continuously how competence in history must be used to prevent disasters in the future. In addition our project will give young persons knowledge and awareness of their responsibility for playing an active role in democratic life. This project plays a role in this common European or international struggle. In Europe not only educators are concerned with drop outs in schools. Too many people leave school too early, and this influences the European policy agenda. Our project will be a contribution to keeping teachers and stakeholders updated, motivated and inspired in their work. This will influence the learning outcome and working environment for pupils and eventually their motivation for finishing school.
In the application we wrote that the GoDemo project aims at developing an app to be used in teaching history and social science, linking the informal teaching in museums to more formal learning in schools. The app would contribute to focusing on the European challenges of promoting democratic values, combating radicalism, extremism and xenophobia. When we received the funding for the project, which in fact was rejected at first, the funding did not cover expenses for developing an app. Our national agency explained that the project would be ok without an app in their opinion and advised project funding without this part. Fortunately, we know more now and admit that this app would have needed more time and money to be functional. On the other hand, we then had to adjust the project plan regarding tangible output, so that there would be a different idea of output to present the teaching ideas and activities we have developed and tested. This is now being realized in a booklet and replaces the focus on the app. The booklet will be published digitally by the library at the University of South-Eastern Norway. The coordinator of this project has been Vestfold county council which during the project period merged with Telemark county council. Three other regional Norwegian partners have taken part; with the regional university, an upper secondary school and the Vestfold museums. From Sweden the Moderna museum in Malmoe participated with 1-2 curators, from Poland an upper secondary school took part, a German upper secondary school and a company from Italy specializing in European projects took part together with a local classical upper secondary school. The schools’ participants were mainly teachers of history or ICT and representatives from the administration. The university invited a delegation of lecturers from the ICT department and department of visual communication. The county council included three members of the international team working with upper secondary education. All in all the group consisted of around 20 participants for each meeting. By the end of November 2020 we have carried out 5 transnational project meetings more or less as planned. Four of them were physical meetings in partner countries such as Norway, Germany, Poland and Italy. From March 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted our project plans and forced us to cancel the last physical meeting in Sweden in April 2020 and later in October 2020. Of course we asked our national agency to prolong our project period as much as possible. The last physical meeting was carried out by a digital solution in November 2020. From the beginning we had planned an activity where we would invite some students from 3 of the partner schools to join us for the transnational meeting in Italy. When we wrote the application this was the original plan, and we did not realise or know that we could not mix a transnational meeting with a “Learning, teaching and training activity”. Besides, the learning activity would have to last 3 days as a minimum, and we preferred to have a 2 days’ meeting in Livorno. It means that we made a mistake when applying for funding of the “Learning activity” and should have included a larger group og participants in the transnational meeting in Italy in the first place. Since we had to change our main expected tangible outcome, we decided to collect all our shared and developed material in a booklet. This will soon be published. Besides, we aimed at building interesting networks and increase our awareness of international challenges and contribute to new arenas for sharing good practices. It is quite obvious that we have created a strong feeling of community and professional and personal relationships in the project group. We have met partners who have pronounced that “This project must not end” and someone said that he just loves the project. We have all been very open and honest during the process and we have worked with serious issues. It was really a sad ending of the project when we could not meet physically, although the technical zoom solution worked well. Some of the benefits from this project, is that more people in each institution have gained knowledge about Erasmus+ project work and also become inspired by the experience. It means that each participant has been affected, which is a positive result and represents important competence and marketing value for Erasmus+. Our awareness of democratic challenges and respect for learning from history has definitely increased and is reflected in the impact section of this report. We also think that we have gained mutual respect for each profession represented in the project group, as well as respect for the different culturures and countries we represent, working together on the important topics. Summing up we hope that all this will have a long-term effect, and that the way we perform our job and act as citizens will change gradually.