During the 20th century, Europe was strike by two world wars and was stuck in the middle of the "cold war" whereas with the treaty of Rome, Europe was born as an entity and an area of peace. Nowadays, a new threat has emerged with the terrorist attacks striking our countries. It is for us very important to teach our student who never had to live in a country in war that peace is a very complex notion that is built and not given. Education and especially transnational education is a strong help to raise the generation to come to understand what is peace and what means to live in peace with our neighbours and ourselves. Students aged from 14 to 16 coming from France, Germany and Norway will work together on the construction of Europe as cooperative community despite their different History (opponents, not in EU, ...). Through this project we aim : - in building a strong EU citizenship feeling to prepare the coming years and their grown-up mobility. - in learning how to cooperate with people with a different culture and point of view - in making our students have more autonomy in their work and in the way they deal with informations - in using the past to avoid the future conflicts - in increasing the language skills of our students and giving them the opportunity to use it as a communication language (and not as a taught language). With the visit of Compiègne where WWI armistice was signed a century ago and from where people were deported from the train station in WWII our students will be impregnated of the context of the war and will understand the process concretely. Weil-Der-Stadt, city of Germany that was in the middle of the "cold war" will be a perfect illustration of how peace can lead to terrible situations when it's not based on mutual cooperation. Lillestrom close to Oslo, where the Nobel Peace Prize is given every year will allow our students to understand the complexity of the peace concept. The students will also work on understanding how Europe was think to be the answer to create an area of peace. Finally our countries, in Berlin, Oslo and Paris where strike by terrorist attacks, therefore we will have a tragic experience to rely on and our students will work on what peace means in our countries nowadays and in the days to come. A download section on our twinspace (with ressouces and teaching material) will be available to make our ressources accessible to other teachers community. Such as our twinspace is public and can be visited for further informations.
We first built our project around the ideas of people and a world in pieces after a war and how we could come to peaces (global and individual) after such wars in the 20th century. We had imagined dealing with new forms of violence (terrorism for one) in a third part of the project, how to fight terrorism and how people could find resilience after a terrorist attack. Because of the war in Ukraine, we changed our minds and decided to focus our attention on the EU, how it was built and what it could do and what it could become in such troubled times. Moreover, as our Norwegian partener dropped out, we decided not to work on the Nobel Peace Prize. We focused on French and German relationships since the end of the second world war. Nevertheless, our pedagogical objectives remained the same: - Building a strong EU citizenship feeling to prepare the coming years and their grown-up mobilities. - Learning how to cooperate with people with a different culture and points of view - Making our students have more autonomy in their work and in the way they deal with information - Knowing the past not to make the same mistakes again and to avoid future conflicts - increasing the language skills of our students and giving them the opportunity to use them as a communication language to cooperate and share (and not as a taught language). With the visit to Compiègne where WWI armistice was signed a century ago, the first part of our project went as planned. All the work on the Treaty of Versailles was done and shared on a twinspace as well as the visits. We had to then leave the project aside for two years because of the pandemics and our Norwegian partner dropped out. We asked the National Agency to report the end of the project which they agreed to do. We got back to the project in September 2021 getting ready for the second part of the mobility in Germany in May 2022. All the details about this second mobility are in interim report n°2. We think all our objectives were achieved for most students even though a few had a hard time speaking English in front of others and one French student encountered serious problems integrating with the group. We are very thankful to the experts for their unconditional support and precious help during the workshops. We are so satisfied with the work on the fresco even though we did not manage to get the Art teacher with us during that week in Germany. The students were very creative and independent in making this piece of art. It is now exhibited in the diningroom in Liebenzell castle. The German teachers have asked us for a new project next year... we have to think about it as we already have had a German partner school for 20 years that we do not want to feel left out.