We wanted to broaden our particular perspective with regard to inclusive, multilingual teaching. On the one hand, we were interested in praxis and wanted to sit in on bi- or polylingual schools, but on the other hand we also wanted to collect evidence-based information about successful activities in the classroom. Furthermore, we hoped to find partners through this project who would stay in contact with us, either as class teachers or headmasters/mistresses, beyond the period of our mobility. Our students should get to know about everyday school life elsewhere and take part in it via digital media. Implementing new techniques with a focus on CLIL should be possible for all colleagues, even if not all of them had done a mobility. The travelling colleagues should act as a conduit to bring what they have learned into the classes. Looking beyond our own school system should also give us the courage to try new things and introduce unconventional methods. Since we are still in our infancy digitally in Austrian primary schools, our interest was also drawn to the current state of digital implementation elsewhere.
Our special focus is called "intensive English" and enables us to offer 6 to 7 hours of English as a working language at all school levels. Thus, both the class teachers and the native speaker teachers are involved with English lessons on a daily basis. With the increasing duration of the project and a changing workforce, as well as a constant change in the composition of the classes, we realised that the English lessons needed to be adapted. Schools from other European and international countries had been asking for some time whether they can visit our school. We were happy to comply with these requests and were also able to learn a lot from the discussions with our colleagues. In the school year 2017/18 we made the acquaintance of the principal of a bilingual school in Liechtenstein. This acquaintance turned into a cooperation that finally led to us deciding to start a mobility project. Our focus was on visiting English-speaking schools, inclusion, and courses on language learning. So, in the spring of 2019 we submitted our application for our "BIPS goes Europe" project.