The changing social and economic circumstances in which students find themselves make it harder for them to develop individual profiles and characters. This is even harder for boys and young male adults who have to compete between themselses and with their female counterparts who seem to have the better standing and thus learn more easily and get the better marks at graduation, which again results in better jobs - even if they still do not get equal pay for them. Boys develop social malfunctions, they drop out from school earlier, and withdraw into virtual realities in which they fulfil their dreams of being successful. This project aims at raising awareness, at finding new approaches to make the students feel responsible for themselves and for others, at creating a better understanding of differences and similarities in a European context, and finally at connecting perople across the European Union. The objectives are to exchange good practices to improve the qualityand efficiency of education and training to make lifelong learning and mobility a reality; to create new and innovative materials to reduce school frustration and early school leaving; to develop new methods to improve the quality and efficiency of education and training and to enhance creativity and innovation with the students; to pay attention to students with special needs by promoting equity and social cohesion by including students with social disorders and students with economic difficulties and students with migration background; and to foster the development of multicultural and interpersonal skills by making intercultural meetings and communication in a foreign language possible. The participants live in Avola/Italy, Huelva/Spain, Viersen/Germany and Cesis/Latvia and the first three schools have worked together on a previous Erasmus+ project on CLIL methodologies. The Latvian school has been found on eTwinning and they have never participated in an Erasmus+ project before. The number of participating students from each of the four schools will be eighteen. They are born in the years 2003-2004 and are fulltime students of the participating schools, and they will be selected in a transparent and fair way that will be documented and public. The participating teachers have shown interest in working internationally and teach different subjects ranging from sciences to the arts to social sciences, and they will accompany the students in their preparatory work and in the Learning/Teaching/Training activities. At the beginning of the participants will meet in Viersen/Germany to get to know each other's schools and their home towns and regions. The second meeting will take place in Avola/Italy and concentrate on agriculture and the changing ways of growing, harvesting and preparing food/national diets in the four different countries. In the third meeting in Huelva/Spain the students will examine the life of some important persons of their home countries who led exceptional lives and can thus offer new approaches to their own way of life. The final meeting in Cesis/Latvia will see the students work on craftsmanship and entrepreneurism and tradition in a modern society to intensify their understanding of what it means to live in a world of changes in traditions. After having been granted the project the coordinators will set up the necessary ICT equipment for the participants to enable them to communicate with each other, once they have been selected. Communication can be done by different means, using social networks and skype, writing emails, and also establishing a TwinSpace on eTwinning that is available at different levels to the participants and to a wider community. A variety of activities will make it possible for the participants to find attractive methods they want to use, such as ICT programmes made for presentations, survey programmes, evaluation programmes and programmes used to design tables, grids, etc. Photo and video materials will be used to document the meetings and saved on the project's platform. Apart from working on and with ICT, the participants will also experience the areas of their partners' countries and go on excursions to support their learning about other cultures in connection with the topics of the mobilities, which will also be documented. The results of the project's activities will be saved on the project's platform and made accessible to all the participants to work with them. After the project will have finished the results will also be made accessible to the staff of the participating schools, and if possible, to other schools as well. They may also be used by teachers-in-training at their seminars and published in journals. The participants will experience different cultures and learning methods and thus be enabled to aquire new skills they will be able to use in their future life (life long learning). They will be able to reconsider their way of learning together and their future role in society.
Gender differences - cultural differences - historical differences ... and similarities The project has shown that either of these three terms could have been used to meet the objectives of it. 18 students from each country were accompanied by 6 teachers to Viersen, Avola and Huelva. Unfortunately, the Italian group could not participate in the mobility in Cesis due to the lockdown in Italy during the Covid 19 pandemic. Finding students proved to be easy, but finding an equal number of boys and girls for the project could not be made sure of for the schools in Cesis and Viersen, where the number of girls exceeded that of the boys by far. The Spanish group consisted of almost the same number of boys and girls, and only the Italian group managed to find enough boys. The reasons for boys not to participate may be manifold, but they cannot be evaluated as those who were asked as to why they refrained from participating were mostly too shy to answer. Those boys who participated integrated well into the different teams that were formed in the mobilities, proving that coeducation is the right means to further gender equality. In the working sessions as well as in their free time on excursion and in the evenings the students mixed in different groups, bigger and smaller, thus involuntarily fulfilling the objective of “developing multicultural and interpersonal skills”. To support the achievement of this objective actively a variety of methods was employed, of which only a number will be highlighted here. Working on the Kamishibai for the presentation in Avola the students had to find out about less often mentioned, but important women from their area. This method was completely new for both teachers and students, and it was later awarded a prize by the Italian Ministry for Gender Equivalence (objectives no. 2 and 3: creation and development of new methods) In Huelva almost the whole school community participated in a day of international games that had been prepared by the Erasmus+ students plus a group of local students to add some more ideas, like dancing Zumba ® in the forest (objective no. 1: exchange of good practices) In Cesis the students’ group looked back into their ancestors’ way of life and into their own ideas for their future. Looking back was supported by real life adventure, getting into historical costumes and customs, becoming gentry and peasants, pilgrims and craftsmen and –women. Looking ahead demanded artistic skills to show where they saw themselves in twenty years ahead. (Objective no. 5) In Viersen the students had to do a number of Metalog® training tools to improve their dexterity as a group, to function as a team and win against other groups, r to rely on others and show their trust in them. The variety of tools and ideas the whole international team had to offer was immense and diverse and in the evaluations at the end of the mobilities the students approved of most of them. Only few were considered boring (like “getting-to-know-each-other” rounds) or not appealing. It showed that students learned a lot about the cultures of the other groups, that past and present teaching methods at school are not as different as they thought, and most importantly that their own way of life as European citizens is different mostly because of the surroundings they live in, but not because they are different. Gender equality has been established in all the four countries’ school systems, coeducation has been the norm since the 1970s at the latest and students consider themselves individuals not because of being male or female, but because they are who they are.