The idea of this project arises from the need to make students aware of the importance of their local and national cultural heritage and to make them be able firstly, to preserve local customs and traditions and pass them down to younger students and secondly, to gather more knowledge on tangible heritage in order to act as tourist guides to visitors and mentors to younger students. The students will thus take on a more active role in the process of (self)learning and peer-teaching. By working with schools from different countries the students will learn how geoclimatic, social and historical backgrounds and settings affect cultural heritage. They will look for differences and similarities and they will learn to treasure their own heritage and national identity that is sometimes neglected in modern times of globalisation, and to tolerate and accept new cultures. Having the opportunity to work with other students from different language backgrounds will also give them the chance to strengthen and improve their foreign language skills. The project will involve all the students from all the three schools with an age range from 6-15 (Slovenia, about 400 students; Poland, about 150 students) and from 10-18 (Portugal, about 900 students). However, the number of students who will be directly involved in the exchanges is about 8 students per country within the age range of 14-18. The teachers will be involved in the projects directly and indirectly. Indirect involvement suggests working on the topic with whole classes with no direct contribution to the project in terms of reports and interactions with foreign peers, while direct involvement will include teachers who will be responsible for the project and will accompany students in their exchange visits. This partnership will offer the teachers the opportunity to share teaching methodologies and educational and cultural materials with colleagues from different countries. It will enhance their professional development by increasing the quality of teaching, including new pedagogies and ICT based methodologies. All the activities are designed to promote the primary goal to preserve and appreciate one’s own cultural heritage while value diversity. At the beginning of the project, all students from the age of 10 to 18 will be given an on-line questionnaire which will determine how much they know about their cultural heritage. The same questionnaire will be presented to students after the first year of the project and at its end. By making so, the students and the teachers will have the opportunity to partly evaluate the results of the project. In between the questionnaires, the students will be asked to interact with their peers from other schools by meeting on-line, creating and sending e-postcards with topic related content, making treasure-hunt-like educational trails, making simple video tutorials on how to make typical local souvenirs, making brochures on the sights/events etc.During the exchanges, they will act as tourist guides and culture promoters. They will show their peers their local and some national customs and main natural and historical sights on field trips. A very important part of all the activities will be cooperative learning that will be promoted by activities such as ‘The Travelling Suitcase’, workshops (e.g. making souvenirs, cooking) simple experiments (e.g. turning must to wine) and problem-solving tasks (treasure hunts, quizzes). The project will hopefully yield tangible and intangible short-term results. Generally speaking, all students will be aware of the term cultural heritage and will be able to list and describe tangible and intangible items of their local cultural heritage. Additionally, students who will be directly involved in the project will acquire a deeper knowledge of the topic and will be able to share it with younger students. Wanting, older students could apply as tourist guides in apps such as Showaround. In the process, there will be a lot of material that we will document and upload to platforms such as TwinSpace:products and souvenirs from workshops, displays, blogs, video tutorials, e-postcards, articles, educational trails, brochures, quizzes etc. Most of the material can be reused during regular lessons, activity days and future exchange visits. Moreover, by learning how to make local souvenirs, schools can organize workshops for visitors during local events, celebrations and school bazars. Slovenian students will be also invited to cooperate with the local Board of Tourism, which will give them the opportunity to learn about tourism and possibly give them future job opportunities.
The main goal of the project - teaching students about their own local heritage while valuing diversity, has been fulfilled. The tasks were designed to cater for the common and general needs for each school. The Slovenian school managed to implement an elective subject to its curriculum that is dedicated to tourism and local heritage and where students act as tourist guides for younger students. The Polish school created a game (Scavenger’s hunt) which is widely available for everyone, not only school community and which helps to get to know a famous post-industrial working estate called Nikiszowiec in Silesia. The Polish school also tightened cooperation with the board of local tourist attractions (Guido Mine, Queens’s Luise Addit and others) who now became the school partners in certain actions. The Portuguese School prepared a QR code cultural race in the city of Santa Cruz. (Peddy Paper) Students were organized in groups and were asked to answer questions and solve some charades about the cultural heritage of the city by scanning QR codes on race. The game is available online and was implemented in English classes as well. Some of the questions were designed with the help of the local cultural municipality. All the activities that were originally envisioned by the project were carried out, but not necessarily by all the three schools. During the course of the project, some activities were tailored to each school’s individual needs, and were also adjusted to the pandemic Covid-19 that hindered the natural flow of the project. We managed to carry out three LTT events as planned but had to postpone and finally change the final LTT to an on-line event. The last LTT was also the only task that was considerably altered compared to the original plan. The project yielded tangible and intangible short and long-term results. Not only did the project students acquire an in-depth knowledge about their local heritage, but they were also able to disseminate it to other local and foreign students by acting as tourist guides and by participating in workshops where they taught other students what they had learnt themselves. Dissemination within the schools was also possible through social media sharing and informative displays in the so-called Erasmus Corners in each school. Most of the results were documented and uploaded to the project’s TwinSpace and website. We created instructions and video tutorials on how to make traditional local souvenirs, dances, recipes, on-line quizzes, and questionnaires that can be reused as introductory or revision tools during lessons on cultural heritage; an actual memory game that can be used by younger students or as an official gift, a virtual escape room, treasure hunts, informative leaflets, and brochures. Treasure hunts and informative brochures will be used in future short-term exchange programmes as all the three schools would like to continue with international activities -the Slovenian and Polish schools are already involved in a new Erasmus Plus project that also focuses on cultural heritage. Most of the materials will be also translated to the participants’ own mother tongues and will be reused during classes dedicated to cultural heritage in the form of an e-textbook. The Slovenian school is also in the process of designing special field trips for other regional Slovenian schools. The trips will be designed in cooperation with the local institute for tourism, sports, culture, and youth and will be partly guided by our students.