This project is meant to be a follow up of a previous Latvian-Spanish collaborative eTwinning project entitled “FES: Food, Environment and Sport. Let’s Be Healthier!” with students aged 11-13. Both teachers in charge of the project, which started in September 2017, consider that further steps should be taken for two main reasons: to give sense to the students' work by offering them a life-changing opportunity to learn, experience, adopt and adapt good practices in a different socio-cultural context and to create two ICT collaborative and eco-projects (a documentary and a blog) which need to be lived and experienced in order to cause an impact both in the students’ microcosms and in their particular local communities. Thus, providing the students the chance to see and live in a different context and to be aware of the way two European countries cooperate to reach a common end, will surely benefit, not only their specific contexts, but also their lives as changing European agents of the future. We intend our students to achieve several objectives such as: adopt and adapt good sustainable and healthy practices, acquire the skills to use the necessary ICT tools to create their project, learn about a different culture and traditions, value their own culture and traditions, achieve relevant strategies and ways to work cooperatively, value and use each student’s best skills, become creative agents in transforming the community, acquire the skills to become critical to certain practices, seek strategies in the country they work with that enrich their own lifestyles, assess the impact of the actions which are carried out, acquire communicative skills to use in front of a camera and use English as a lingua franca. Since the final product implies the creation of a comparative and practical documentary on good practices as well as a blog, our priority is that they develop relevant and high-quality skills and competences to accomplish these goals. The participants of the project will be about 70 students and the ones who will join the exchange will be: 36 students the first year and 36 different students the second year (aged 13 and 15) who will be accurately selected as well as a teachers’ team which will organise, implement and assess all the activities during the two years and specifically during the exchange periods. The rest of students who do not join in the exchange together with the exchange participants will all work in the project devoting 1 hour per week to it as well as participating in the workshops and activities held during the year. The team will organise varied and concurrent activities which will be linked to the exchange of good practices regarding sustainability and healthy lifestyle (food and sport). These activities are thoroughly detailed in the teaching-learning activities section and in the Annex too: video-meetings, visits, workshops or masterclasses always covering the 3 main topics: environment, food and sport. They are all designed to offer the students perspectives and experiences to comment and compare in their collaborative documentary and blog always using English to communicate. All our students will acquire a critical attitude and they will also learn to value and appreciate their own good practices. Learning by observing and doing is an effective long-lasting methodology to acquire the necessary high-quality competences to become actively involved citizens who follow a healthy lifestyle and who are respectful with the environment. The future European citizens need two essential values: tolerance and commitment within their communities. These are the cornerstones of our project which are linked to the 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage and to its motto: “Our heritage: where the past meets the future” because we maintain that in order to build a better Europe students must work cooperatively and they must learn to value cultural differences as well as, as it is our case, adopt and adapt good practices that are undeniably part of each country’s cultural heritage and which can shape more committed and caring European individuals. As far as the dissemination and impact of the project concerns, all the students involved in the project will display their work in their corresponding Sustainability Council webpage and the city council will be free to use it for any campaign as well as to get ideas that can be actually put into practice. We will also use other sources and social media to spread our students’ work. Furthermore, Agenda 21 will be essential in the dissemination of our project because since the schools will be part of this programme our students' will contribute with their two final products to a local sustainable development. To sum up, we strongly believe our students need to experience this extraordinary chance so as to broaden their minds and become better and complete individuals in all senses because as Albert Einstein said “The only source of knowledge is experience.”
Our FES plan was born as an eTwinning project back in 2017. This meant a key starting point which enabled the participants to meet up and learn new strategies to work together and cooperate in reaching a common aim. After the eTwinning cooperation, we got an Erasmus + KA229 grant and participants aged 14-15 years old could join the project. They could partially enjoy a life-changing opportunity to learn, experience, adopt and adapt good practices in a different socio-cultural context, also create a blog, a collaborative TwinSpace and a documentary focused on the experience and on the project. The participants involved in the 1st and 2nd mobilities could live in a different context and be aware of the way two European countries cooperate to reach a common end. However, the COVID19 pandemic situation meant that mobilities could no longer be feasible, so the Erasmus Team was forced to adapt and seek for virtual strategies in order to achieve the objectives that we initially had. So, in the first year the aims were fully accomplished because the participants could adopt and adapt good sustainable and healthy practices, acquire the skills to use the necessary ICT tools to create their project, learn about a different culture and traditions, value their own culture and traditions, achieve relevant strategies and ways to work cooperatively, value and use each student’s best skills, become creative agents in transforming the community, acquire the skills to become critical to certain practices, seek strategies in the country they work with that enrich their own lifestyles, assess the impact of the actions which are carried out, acquire communicative skills to use in front of a camera and use English as a lingua franca. The objectives were successfully achieved during the 1st and 2nd year mobilities because both teachers and participants filled in 2 questionnaires and the results were very positive. In view of the results obtained, we can reach the conclusion that the participants consider the exchange experience more valuable and life-changing than the project itself. We include all these results in the TwinSpace and in the Platform of Results. During the 1st and 2nd mobilities in 2019 the students were divided in 4 different work-groups and they were in charge of focusing on one of the main topics we wanted them to analyse: food, environment, sport and the students exchange experience. 45 students from both countries recorded their experiences and created different videos, finally a compilation of all the videos was edited. Our priority was that they developed relevant and high-quality skills and competences to accomplish these goals and this was partially achieved because unfortunately the 2020 pandemic limited all the objectives and priorities to a virtual context. During 2020 and 2021 5 different online meetings were held with the students and teachers and we encouraged the 40 new students involved to work on the project in a different way. They couldn’t design a video unfortunately but they continued uploading content both on the blog and the TwinSpace. In the first year, the team organised varied and concurrent activities which were linked to the exchange of good practices regarding sustainability and healthy lifestyle: video-meetings, visits, workshops or masterclasses always covering the 3 main topics: environment, food and sport. The participants acquired a critical attitude and they also learnt to value and appreciate their own good practices. In the second year, the participants shared their posters related to the 3 topics of our FES project and they also devoted one session to debate about ways to cope with COVID-19. They also worked in heterogeneous Latvian-Spanish groups to design posters together and then they introduced them to all the participants, including the two headmasters and the Erasmus Team members. Since the final product was not completed the students could not display their work in their corresponding Sustainability Council webpage. However, we also used other sources and social media to spread our students’ work. The participants had the chance to achieve the objectives, however being prevented from travelling didn’t let them live the experience as fully as the first year participants. Regarding the dissemination in the schools, the 1st year participants shared all these activities with students at their schools who are a year younger and who could eventually join the project. Workshops were organised to debate and talk about the project itself using the TwinSpace, the Blog and the documentary to spotlight their explanations and also to sort out the questions that the future participants could have. The sessions were a success and as a result today we have a lot more students interested in joining an Erasmus experience in comparison to the petitions we had back in 2018. All the channels that we have used to spread and disseminate our project are open for consultation and are free to get any updates related to the 2018-21 project and also to the future cooperation agreement that has been established among different countries: Germany, Estonia, Finland and Latvia to continue working on issues related to improving our environment and our own lifestyle. The Erasmus Team considers that this project has been a starting point and a source of inspiration to develop a project with more experience which has been obtained all through these years of working cooperatively either through eTwinning initially and through an Erasmus partnership later. We regard ourselves as more prepared and trained to engage a new group of students to join a new project and create quality products in the future. Both our schools and their future students will surely benefit of this expertise.