Culture In Action will be a two-year project resulting from a partnership among teachers and pupils who work in different but complementary schools in Cyprus, France, Slovakia and the Netherlands.We are two vocational and 2 general schools.Our pupils will be 14-17 years old. Many from our students come from social disadvantaged families and are issued from immigration and have no opportunity to travel, to come in contact with people from other countries, to get in touch with other cultures and to experience their culture heritage. They lack confidence in themselves, in autonomy and in self esteem. With our project we will be able to give them keys to show them the richness in them and around them and that diversity and its cultural heritage is a positive way to be integrated into the society they live in. Knowing the other cultures our pupils will become more tolerant, more open minded and it will stimulate their mutual respect, push them to carry on their studies to become active European citizens. They are bond with the history and identity of their past (herited from their parents and grandparents) with the present in their everyday life and with the future that they will pass on to their younger brothers and sister and children. Our four schools are convinced of the benefit of European projects on their pupils. Our objectives are : To gain a deeper understanding and knowledge of foreign cultures and strengthening international relationships in creating an escape game To confront challenges outside a familiar support network and comfort zone. To give our students the feeling they are European citizens We will be working with the Twinspace of eTwinning, it will allow us to have a secure place where to work, to share, to discuss, to collaborate on the different themes and tasks with a much larger number of students between and during the Learning,Teaching, Training activities which will take place. Teams of motivate teachers and administrative staff will come to support our students to achieve the final best results in our project. There will be 4 Learning, Teaching, Training activities, one in each country, two during the first year and two during the second year. During the life of our project, our pupils will work in national and international teams to discover each other, to confront their ideas, to increase their language, entrepreneurial, ICT skills. They will have to present, analyse, synthese, collaborate, create tasks and activities. They will learn and teach different traditional songs and dances of their partners.. There will be several tangible results in our project : leaflets promoting the points of interests in our regions of our four countries which will be distributed to primary pupils to make them discover their cultural heritage; a recipe ebook with our fusion meals ; films of our mobilities ; newsletters explaining our activities; a website ; the twinspace ; an escape game. The escape game will be composed of questions, riddles about the cultural themes such as our traditional food and the singing and dancings which match with important celebrations in our respective country. This escape game will be played by volunteer pupils in our respective schools during the celebration of the Day of Europe. With this innovative way of working to learn by doing, we hope our pupils will be interested and more willing to motivate themselves in their studies to engage themselves on higher studies and to get the higher diploma as they can and want. They will gain new skills from their peers and they will realise that they all need each other to create and arrive to produce something. We wish they will be better integrated into the society and will become more curious with other people cultures in order to have in mind to enrich oneself and to tolerate one's neighbour. Our project will have long term benefit because our results wil be available to everyone, leaflets, the escape game will be available in our website and on the eTwinning Twinspace. Every person interested could play with it the idea can be transferable to the other numerous themes which is included into European Heritage.
Culture in action involved teachers and students from 4 complementary schools from Cyprus, France, the Netherlands and Slovakia and it lasted 3 years. Our students were between 14 and 17 years old and came from 2 vocational schools and 2 general schools. Many of them came from socially disadvantaged families and were issued from immigration. Working together gave them the opportunity to come in contact with people from other countries and discover the culture from their partners. Most of our students lacked confidence in themselves, in autonomy and in self-esteem and we were convinced that the richness of the cultural heritage and diversity highlighted all along our project activities would allow our students to be more tolerant, more open minded and it would stimulate their mutual respect. Teaching with the profile of our students needed to be done in an innovative way to push them to carry on with their studies and to become active European citizens of tomorrow. Our objectives were: To gain a deeper understanding and knowledge of foreign culture and strengthen international relationships in creating an escape game. To confront challenges outside a familiar support network and comfort zone. To give our students the feeling they are European citizens We had 5 Learning, Teaching and Training Activities. During the first year, 1 called “By understanding”in Slovakia where our students got to know each other, built our project identity, discovered some part of the Slovakian cultural heritage and started to work on the creation of quizzes for our escape game. 1 in France called “By valueing” where our students cooked a fusion meal in international teams, discovered some part of the cultural heritage and continued the creation of the escape game. During the second year, we had 1 in Cyprus called “By caring” where our students sang and danced traditional dances in the amphitheater of Kourion, discovered some part of the Cypriot culture heritage and invented the setting for the escape game and continued the creation of more quizzes for the escape game. Because of the worldwide lockdown we couldn’t have our Learning, Teaching and Training Activity in the Netherlands. So we asked for a one year extension for our project in hope to be able to do our last visit but in vain, because of the pandemic situation we finalised our project with a fifth Learning Teaching and Training activity with one three-day-online meeting. Our students could exchange with a Member of the European Parliament, visited virtually the European Parliament, discovered some part of the Dutch cultural heritage online and had great fun playing online with their escape game in international teams. We worked with the Twinspace of eTwinning. It enabled us to have a secure place where to work in teams, to discuss, to collaborate on the different themes and tasks which involved a much larger number of students between, during and after the Learning, Teaching and Training Activities. Our students worked in national or in international teams to get to know each other, to discover their countries, their gastronomy, their traditional songs and dances. They presented, analysed, synthesized, collaborated, evaluated and created various tasks and activities which improved languages, entrepreneurial and ICT skills. The tangible results are a Twinspace with all our project process and results; a multilingualism dictionary; a website; a netiquette chart; 4 emagazines summarizing our Learning Teaching and Training activities; 4 leaflets; a ecooking recipe book with all our recipe cooked by the students during the fusion meal; 8 films on our various subjects such as Learning Teaching and Training Activities and our students’ opinion on our project; 1 live TV show recorded during our online meeting; our Escape Game. The escape game setting was chosen by our students and it is composed of several quizzes on cultural facts of our four countries and created by our students. The impacts are huge for our participants. Our students were very active during all phases of our project, they were more interested in working to learn by doing and became more motivated in their studies and most of them had wished to pursue their studies. They gained confidence and self esteem. Working in international teams made them realise how important it is. The international part of this project enriched their linguistic skills and pushed them to be more curious and more tolerant toward their neighbours.The teachers reinforced their knowledge in project management and in innovative teaching. This project was highlighly disseminated to the eTwinning community thanks to the coordinators who are ambassadors and who participated in national and international webinars to share their expertise on collaborative activities and informing about our project as a way to implement student centered learning. Our project is visible on the Twinspace and is a source of inspiration for more teachers.