The footprint is the result of everything it takes to get your food from the farm to your plate. Many of those processes are invisible to consumers and they take a tremendous toll on our soil, air and water, as well as on the workers and the surrounding communities. Modifying our students' and communities footprints will provide all new tools to be more self-sufficient and to face future challenges. This project has been undertaken by a group of 4 schools from 4 European countries: Spain (coordinator), France, Italy and Latvia. They share different experiences in the various fields of teaching and learning peer work, and also a will to develop these skills. This association of schools is the result of a careful process: the coordinator published a proposal on the eTwinning forum that was answered by a lot of schools. 3 of these schools were selected by applying certain criteria to make sure the final group would be cohesive, efficient and well-balanced. Their experience in European projects have been taken into account. The topics of the project have been valued in different fields, such as employability, education and globalization. The social inclusion was the first topic in our mind as growing vegetables in our gardens allow a better relationship between teachers and students. Also, our mentoring program including families in risk of social exclusion will disseminate better our project into communities. So, the beneficiaries of the project are students, schools, teachers, families, stakeholders and the areas where our students will implement the acquired knowledge. What's more, there will be students with special needs, who thanks to the project, will reach their full potential and will have the opportunity to improve some skills. We established 5 scopes of action to work on: growing local seeds, building a greenhouse, mentoring program, creating datasheets and getting our own local seeds. We'll reach these objectives through a certain number of activities, as well as particular modes of management and assessment. Nearly all activities have a 1st phase in each school -coordinated on eTwinning- and a 2nd one, internationalized, to be done in the 4 short-term student exchanges, one in each school. We want the maximum number of students to benefit from these international contexts. In each exchange, there'll be activities that will be the culmination and summary of those done in the previous months in each school. There'll also be time to get to know the place (city, region...) and a time for teachers to track and manage the project. At the beginning of the project, we'll do a short-term joint staff training event devoted to peer learning on the main topics. The combination of the experience of these schools with these topics and their desire to improve leads us to conclude that only by sharing our knowledge and participating in common training we can truly be part of in the project and understand what and how we want to teach our students. We have elements to ensure sound functioning of the project. The coordinator school has successfully organised other European projects, and the other schools have repeatedly shown their proactivity and skills for team-work when working on the project. Tracking the project will be done in thematic work groups integrated by teachers from all schools. Furthermore, assertivity, a working environment, capacity for constructive debate and efficiency displayed when preparing the project all allow us to believe that these factors will combine to establish our prevailing mode of operation. However, a certain number of operating rules were set up to support this good work. Assessment to correct any issues will be done at different times on an ongoing basis, but especially at the end of each semester and at the end of the project. A survey to assess the state of learning among the students will be passed out at the beginning and at the end of the project to assess their evolution. The short-term students' exchanges will have their own assessment. Also, all students of our schools, families, teachers and stakeholders will undergo an assessment process. However, some objectives won't be assessed within the project deadline. We expect the lasting effects of the project to be visible for many years thanks to the consistency which its structures can bring about. In the succeeding years we'll evaluate the effects that we hope will have endured over time. We’ll disseminate the project by different means. ETwinning and TwinSpace will be the main platforms for communication and collection of all the material and tasks that we’ll do. We’ll create a project blog/webpage. Diffusion will also be done through local press, social networks, and the normal channels used by education professionals (symposia, papers, meetings...) in each country.
The first thing we want to mention about our project is the fact that it has been developed during a world pandemic situation. We asked for the extra year to fulfill our goals because we thought that the pandemic would stop in a few months. As we all know, it didn't happen that way and we want to stand out that it has been an enormous effort for all the partners to go on with the project and modify/change our plans. This project has been undertaken by a group of 4 schools from 4 European countries: Spain (coordinator), France, Italy and Latvia. They shared different experiences in the various fields of teaching and learning peer work, and also a will to develop these skills. The topics of the project were valued in different fields, such as employability, education and globalization. The social inclusion was the first topic in our mind as growing vegetables in our gardens allow a better relationship between teachers and students. Also, our mentoring program including famiThe short-term students' exchanges had their own assessment. Some objectives weren't assessed within the project deadline as we previously considered but now more activities need a future view because of the pandemia.lies in risk of social exclusion had the will of disseminating better our project into communities. Unfortunately, because of the world pandemic situation this part of including famillies wasn't achieved because we had to stop working at school and all the crops in our gardens died. Moreover, it was completely forbidden to have anyone from outside the classroom groups to participate in any school tasks. The beneficiaries of the project have been students, schools, teachers, families (speacially those participating in the real mobility and the 3 online mobilities), stakeholders and the areas where our students implemented the acquired knowledge. What's more, there were students with special needs, who thanks to the project, reached their full potential and had the opportunity to improve some skills. We established 5 scopes of action to work on: growing local seeds, building a greenhouse, mentoring program (which wasn't achieved as explianed above), and getting our own local seeds (which was also a little bit difficult as our crops died for many months and we all have to replant again using previous local seeds). We reached those objectives through a certain number of activities, as well as particular modes of management and assessment. Nearly all activities had a 1st phase in each school -coordinated on eTwinning- and a 2nd one, internationalized, to be done in the 4 short-term student exchanges, one in each school. Due to the pandemic situation we only could have 1 real mobility of students (in Navàs-C2). Nevertheless, we had online mobilities with the other countries to carry on as many tasks and workshops of the project as possible. We had several online meetings up to September 2021 to talk about the chance of travelling. Unfortunatelly, all partners thought it was not the best decision to travel considering the restrictions of each country and the fact that most of the activities had to be modified. For instance, we couldn't achieve the mentoring program throughout all the project because of the lockdown and the parts mentioned above. Also, we had problems with the growing of our vegetables garden and in September 2021 we had to start from scratch. Likewise, the home automation of the greenhouses couldn't be done because that was something we had to learn during the Italian mobility and doing it online was impossible as we all need the technological information learnt by doing. However, we grew our vegetable gardens, we built our greenhouses (although the bad weather in Spain and France destroyed our first greenhouse) and we decided to exchange the information about including home automation in our greenhouses in the future even when the project will be finished. In the same way, the French team and the Catalan team shared with our partners our will to host students in the future without being in any Erasmus project as we missed that experience in Latvia, Italy and France. We had elements to ensure sound functioning of the project. The coordinator school had successfully organised other European projects, and the other schools have repeatedly shown their proactivity and skills for team-work when working on the project. All the countries helped a lot during the pandemic situation and we were all open-minded and wilful to change all the activities which needed a new perspective due to the pandemic situation. Assessment to correct any issues were done at different times on an ongoing basis, but especially at the end of each semester and at the end of the project. We disseminated the project by different means: eTwinning and TwinSpace were the main platforms for communication and collection of all the material and tasks that we did. Diffusion will also be done through local press, social networks, and schools' webpages.