We wanted the staff involved in this project to improve their communication skills in English so that they could develop their own intercultural projects and communicate well with their partners without necessarily going through the language teachers. In the medium term, we also wanted to enable colleagues to obtain DNL certification, or even open a European section. For staff without language difficulties, we wanted to allow them to train in Europe, exchange with other teachers on their practices and allow them to discover new teaching methods. Thanks to intercultural projects, adapted training, the use of innovative ICT tools, peer work and interdisciplinary activities, we hoped to include and encourage our educational staff to try new activities in foreign languages and thus offer our students better quality content, in line with European expectations and the skills to be acquired today.
Collège Elsa Triolet is a public school with 535 students, 15 of whom are cognitively impaired and approximately 25% of whom are special needs students (most of whom suffer from dyslexia and other dys-problems). Most of our students and families rarely access the cultural activities offered by our region. Many of them come from rural and disadvantaged backgrounds and cannot afford most activities. We believe that Erasmus projects help our students to learn about other cultures and motivate them to acquire academic skills. However, the current problem remains the low level of foreign languages of the staff members of the coordination team of these European projects and in particular English, the language of our projects, which hinders them in their relations with the European partners, and obliges them to use the language teachers as translators. The colleagues who are more at ease with the language wanted to develop new teaching methods to offer richer and more attractive content to the students.