Motala and Reggio Emilia

The project MARE – Motala and Reggio Emilia – has involved two upper secondary schools providing general education: Liceo Scientifico Aldo Moro, in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and Platengymnasiet, located in Motala on lake Vättern in Sweden. Both schools have, among others, a program in science. Both schools are currently seeking to renovate and rethink their teaching practice of scientific subjects in order to better meet the educational and cultural challenges of today’s world and to make the use of digital media a permanent feature of teaching and learning. Through the implementation of this project the students have been engaged in new forms of learning mode which hopefully have somehow sharpened their soft and hard skills and competences, spurred their motivation, developed their critical thinking skills and their sense of European belonging. Likewise the teachers have been able to discuss, investigate, share and enhance the teaching of scientific subjects , namely chemistry, biology, and physics. The project has been carried out in English, which has enhanced the language competence of both students and teachers. The project initial objectives were: 1. To provide students with transnational learning experiences that would improve their skills and competences in key subjects for their cultural and professional growth: experimental sciences (physics, chemistry, biology), English language, digital literacy. 2. To promote the students' ability to teamwork transnationally, with the specific aim to widen their cultural horizon by forming meaningful relationships and work collaborations with peers from another European country, thus building up European citizenship. 3. To enable teachers from two different educational backgrounds to compare and enrich their teaching practices in the scientific area, to improve their language skills in CLIL teaching (ENGLISH) , to consolidate and widen their digital literacy. The participants have been: for Italy a math/physics teacher, a biology/chemistry teacher, two teachers of English; for Sweden two math/physics teachers, one biology/chemistry teacher and one English/Italian teacher, one English teacher. Not all of them have been involved in year two and three. The first year the students involved were a class of 21 sixteen-year-old Italian kids and a class of 22 seventeen-year-old Swedish kids. The second year two new classes of Italian and Swedish students were chosen to participate but the onset of the Covid pandemic significantly altered the continuation of the project. In YEAR ONE the activities carried out were: transnational meetings for staff alone and students visiting the partner's country. The students attended mini-lessons and experiences of physics, chemistry, biology in their own schools and in the partner school when visiting, carried out tasks in groups with final production of outcomes and presentations, in collaboration with the partner peers. They met virtually through the Internet and in person to carry out the planned activities. There were also field trips and the meaningful experience of sharing one another's home since the students were hosted by the students' families. The teachers of the two schools have always planned the activities together, organized and managed the students' activities, supervised the students' groupwork and transnational cooperation, they met the partner school's colleagues twice the first year for the parts of the project to be done in presence with the students, and once a year for a preparation meeting at the beginning of each school year. In YEAR TWO and THREE it has not been possible to carry out the same activities as planned, on account of the Covid pandemic. Objectives were redesigned to meet the restrictions to travel and the pressures on both teachers and students to conduct their teaching and learning in remote schooling. We had to accommodate all the difficulties of the new situation, also taking into account the fact that Italy and Sweden responded to the pandemic in different ways at different times, so it was virtually impossible to implement activities following the initial plan. However, the teachers were able to jointly decide on a new course of action. Namely they agreed to reproduce the same laboratory experiences as in year one, whenever this would be possible, and to exchange teaching ideas and practices to be delivered to the students when in remote schooling. So they could do hands-on experiences even in their own homes, film them, discuss them, in other words investigate the topics of study through home-based experiences. The students in year two and three have not been able to travel, nor have they developed transnational group activities through the Internet. Actually an attempt to do so was made at the beginning of the first Italian lockdown in March 2020, but it immediately became apparent that there were other priorities to meet and it just couldn't work. Certainly the second year of the project and the third year (extension) have been very different from the first one, but not useless. Far from it. We believe that, given the situation, goals have been achieved, collaboration between partners has survived and thrived, the objectives of the project overall have been met, though admittedly to a lesser extent. Even considering the changes due to the pandemic, the overall impact of the project has been: - improved teaching methodology connected to the scientific area, -new practices and strategies exchanged, transferred and implemented. The results on the stakeholders have been: -Students’ improved knowledge and skills of physics, biology, chemistry and English. -Teachers’ improved teaching skills, improved language skills (English) and increased awareness of new teaching methods. -Teachers’ and students’ improved teamwork skills, increased internationalization of the schools and enhanced European citizenship -Teachers’ and students’ production of new didactic materials in the subjects at the core of the project (such as presentations, reports, data collection and analysis, on-line materials) to be shared both in presence and remotely.. -Teachers’ and students’ increased skills in the use of digital tools, -Increased involvement of families with school life (only for year one students) In the longer term the innovations in teaching method will spill over the whole schools through dissemination activities, such as the meeting we have just had at our Italian school to present all our Erasmus activities to the new teachers and to all the school. During the past two years it has been very difficult to share information when most of the time we have been working from home, or under very great pressures and unfavourable circumstances. The teaching practices exchanged will become a permanent feature of the school because the teachers involved have shared and are going to share them in their respective departments. The teachers' enthusiasm for the experience they've had will spill over new teachers too and yield results as well.