In our present digital age media education takes growing importance in curricular guidelines. Our project focuses on educational work with films, which means that films are not only revised and interpreted, but students are also invited to shoot films themselves. The special challenge of the project is that students from three different countries work together, they do the planning, write the screenplay, act and take care of the technical aspects likewise. This way the students improve key competences in foreign languages and technical skills (IT, camera operations, editing) as well as cooperation and teamwork. Besides, the project is meant to support the introduction of the subject “German” at the Spanish school in Novelda and the subject “Spanish” at the German school in Handrup. The teachers accompanying the project mainly function as mentors, the main decisions as to the screenplay, setting and action will be taken by the students themselves. The topic is to design a plot on the process of the European unification. From the films it should become clear that people first of all see the differences between their nations when they meet, but finally consider the common values as most important. When preparing the project teachers developed several options concerning the plots: Groups of students from various nations meet, utter their prejudices and stereotypes, only speak their own language and communication is impossible in the beginning. In the course of the film these groups get to know each other, get closer, agree on a common language (English) and this way their meeting is finally successful. Another idea is to focus on the historical aspects of the topic: More traditional forms of communication are contrasted to more modern media which make communication much easier. Thus the process of digitalization would be presented as a process of gaining unity and experiencing common European traditions and values. However these ideas will not be given to the students. The participants will develop their own ideas. In the projects you find three schools with 25 students per school, aged 15 to 18. Three international groups will be formed and they will deal with the screenplay, the acting and the technical side of film production. These three groups are going to meet once in a schoolyear, to exchange their results and advance their work together. For the bigger part of the students this means that they will take part in two of the six planned meetings. A few of the students (directing, camera operations) are expected to take part in more than two meetings. Between the meetings students and teachers exchange their ideas via eTwinning, which is ideal as it offers the chance to send and receive materials and to evaluate plans and ideas mutually. Project work is done in extracurricular activities in Novelda and Saint Quentin and in a special subject called “Seminarfach” in Handrup. This means that students can apply for the projects at each school. According to former experiences lots of students are interested in these international projects. Altogether a group of 75 students directly participates in the project, whereas additional students can join in at the annual meetings. Additionally each school has a team of five teachers involved in the project, all of them are very experienced in international cooperation of schools and media education. The film will be presented publicly to all the students at each school, e.g. in a school-cinema at Novelda and it will also be published on the schools’ websites. As it is work in progress, the schools will present their project work in radio programmes twice per half-year/term so that all the other schools can stay informed, too. This project is considered to be a kind of test and starting signal for the three schools. Our common aim is to install this kind of joint film production projects in other school partnerships, so that this type of integrative work can be done during future exchange visits and become a basic element/module of media education in our school life.
The project has been an exceptional success. All three partner schools found groups of students, who worked on creating the joint film with excitement and enthusiasm, very quickly. These students were about 16 years old, in Handrup they took part in a Seminarfach given by Dr. Thomas Kock. Students in year 12 could choose to join voluntarily and this subject received more votes than places available. In total, 25 students from Handrup participated. In autumn of 2019 (10.-15.11.2019), a first meeting took place in Handrup, comprising two groups of 11 students from Novelda and St. Quentin with two teachers each. The students stayed in host families with their partner students. Find the program of this meeting attached. During the meeting, basic ideas for the script were created, the different teams (script, acting, film technology) got to know each other and made arrangements. The basic idea of the film: Different schools take part in a dancing competition, there are strong rivalries and prejudices against participants of other nationalities. In the course of the competition the three partner schools get to the conclusion that they can only win with a joint performance and therefore have to overcome their prejudices and to collaborate. The script should be finished until the next meeting in Novelda. Plans for this second meeting had been well in the making, flights booked, when the pandemic made further personal meetings impossible. Unfortunately, this did not change until the end of the project. The schools kept in touch via videoconferences only, which also has been difficult due to different lockdowns. The three schools thus decided to produce three films on their own, dealing with the pandemic in different ways. The project goals could therefore not been fulfilled due to the pandemic. However, all participants agreed that the project idea worked out very well and that especially film as a medium appealed to the students in a motivating way so that the project should be repeated in the current Erasmus+ cycle. A respective application has already been part of the application for accreditation from Handrup and has been approved recently.