Our project "European Pride" gather six countries : France, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Poland and Latvia, located in different parts of Europe. Our main goal is to make our pupils aware of how wealthy the EU is and how lucky they are to be European citizens . The theme of our project is to make them discover each country's traditions through music and dance, through festivals and national or local celebrations, learn fromXXth century History in Europe and mainly the causes and impacts of the Second World War by visiting each country's landmarks. Doing so, students will realise that however different we all are, we share the same History as well as the same values. In addition, some of our traditions are intertwined due to a much older common History. Our common wealth comes from migrations of people throughout time and meltings of several traditions, and that may lead them to understand that the rising of the extreme right in some parts of Europe is just denying our past and History. Ambassadors will be selected for the transnational activities among students aged between 12 and 14 years old according to their linguistic competence and their merit first, giving priority to the students facing economical and social obstacles so as to enable them to go abroad, to meet with other cultures and to grow up into respectful and tolerant adults. They will have to communicate with one another in English and be fully involved in the project, being able to report back to their classmates after each activity. They will lead debates during the online meetings with their European partners and prepare the next activities, stating their needs and organising what they will have to do next. They will also select what they want to disseminate during the implementation of the project, either on the school website, on their online travel booklets or on local newspapers articles. To do so, they will have to collect ideas and suggestions given by all their fellow partners, take them into account without giving priority to their own opinion if it doesn't meet with the majority. To implement our goals, our team (students, teachers and members of local communities) will work together closely, enriching our work thanks to each one's particular competence. The joint work of the project will result in the following : - the supplying of an online booklet by all the partners on different themes : History, Music, dancing, and differences in our ways of life - a film showing what being European means and why we should all be proud to be European, by showing all that Europe has to offer to each one of us. Students will then improve their competence in English through the need to communicate with foreign students, learning from one another since none of the partners are native English. They will also learn about the making of a film, from the elaboration of the storyboard to the shooting of scenes and the editing, thus improving their IT skills. - a logo contest to promote the idea of our project : this logo will be present in every dissemination of our project during its implementation. - an online diary for everyone to keep a memory of this extraordinary experience, as well as the use of the twinspaces to share and communicate with penfriends. - the supplying of the school websites to disseminate to all the school members who may not necessarily be part of the project but nonetheless interested in the process. - online comic books and Scratch animations presenting different European folk stories and legends. - local newspapers articles and radio interviews to disseminate their experience and knowledge to a larger community : students will show then how proud they are of their work, of their knowledge and experience and of course of being European. Through all these activities, we expect our students to improve remarkably their competence in English and IT, their self-esteem and autonomy as well as their European consciousness. At the same time we hope that through the dissemination on newspapers and radio, all the persons who were not directly concerned by our project may reconsider their opinion about Europe, not looking at its drawbacks for once but at all the wealth it has to offer. The teachers involved in the project will also learn a lot from this experience : they will have the opportunity to discover new ways of teaching so as to improve their own practise. They will certainly meet with new teaching strategies which they can adopt and use.
Our project « Proud to be European » involved six partner countries, that have worked together for 35 months. Our aim was to highlight the wealth of the European Union and enable our pupils to realise how lucky they are to be European citizens. They were able to discover traditions, legends (the rooster of Barcelos, the hermit of Satriano, the witches of Faust...), a carnival (that of Satriano di Lucania), the gastronomy and the art of living of these regions of Europe during mobilities in Italy, Portugal, Germany and France. The covid crisis was an obstacle to the smooth running of the planned activities, but we were able to overcome it by offering an online mobility. On this occasion, we worked on our common history and the reasons that led each of our countries to join the Union. The pupils worked on the creation of an escape game, published via the Genially platform. They became aware that Europe had long been cut into two parts by the Iron Curtain. The activities planned in Germany allowed them to visit emblematic places : Brocken in the Harz Mountains with its former Russian base and the border between the two Germanies. Through all these experiences, our students have developed strong and lasting relationships with their partners. They often exchange messages and are in constant contact. They communicate in English. The objective we had set ourselves to improve their language skills and their openness to the world and to others has been exceeded! As they aare now more confident, they will not hesitate to communicate in English anymore and will be more open-minded and comfortable in their exchanges. In addition, their horizon has been broadened and this is an asset they will keep. During the implementation of the project, we had to overcome many difficulties, all related to the covid crisis or the war in Ukraine. Mobilities were cancelled, rescheduled, modified, adapted, sometimes at the last minute... This was the case for the one planned in March 2020 in Latvia. The mobility in Poland, initially planned in November 2021, was postponed to February 2022, then March 2022 and finally cancelled, a few days before departure, as Swidnik is too close to the Ukrainian border. In order to keep the project active, France has planned an online mobility. It was ready at the beginning of 2020, but due to successive lockdowns in the different partner countries, it could only take place in October 2021. All these programme changes had an impact on the pupils' commitment to the project. However, the mobility in Portugal, organised in one month only by our partners, helped to focus them again. Between December and May, successive cancellations again discouraged the children. But in May, the mobility in Germany allowed them to be remotivated. When we wrote the project, we did not think that perseverance would be an objective, but it has been achieved too. The results produced during the implementation of "Proud to be European" differ slightly from what we had originally planned, due to all the changes in the curriculum and adaptations that followed: * Instead of an online booklet, we produced an escape game on the Genially platform during the online mobility. * We started to shoot the film in Italy. But we had to give it up. Too long had passed between the first and the second mobility and many of the student ambassadors had been replaced by others. Germany organised its mobility jointly with Poland, Latvia with France, the film became a nonsense. Instead, we focussed on creating pages, during each mobility, illustrated by various materials (photos, documents, films) on the project's dedicated twinspace. All the other results produced remained in line with what was written in the application : the logo, the diary (finally on the twinspace, DayTripper proved to be difficult to use with large groups), the ebooks on the captions (under the coordination of Poland), publications in the press and on the websites of the partner schools. Our pupils have grown up with this project. It has allowed them to open up to the world and to be more proud than ever to be European. The situation in Ukraine has unfortunately shown the necessity of remaining united in diversity.