"Glück" - "Happiness" - "Joy" - "Felicity" - who does not strive for it? Irrespective of origin, age, time - everybody wants to be happy, sometimes more and sometimes less consciously. But, what do we actually mean by "happiness"? In youth, which is fundamentally coined by teenagers' search for their identity, the question of "happiness" opens up for the first time in a person's life. Apart from that, students all over Europe are currently experiencing first-hand a global crisis whose long-term consequences for our societies and for Europe as a whole cannot be predicted yet. In this acute crisis situation, the questions of what "good life" means and what we understand to be our common values in society open up again. For in the end, basing your life upon your core values helps to tackle crises. Agreeing on and promoting common values will be of critical importance for the future of Europe, and young people play a crucial part in that. Our project has therefore gained an unforeseen topicality. Therefore, if in Europe, we understand school as a place in which we do not only trasmit and learn knowledge, but in which we lay the foundation for a successful life, we need to place the question of happiness into the centre of our work. This is where our project sets off. In a group of 20 German and 20 Spanish 10th-grade students and four teachers, we will address the question of happiness from an intercultural and intergenerational perspective. As the product of our project, we will bundle our findings in a radio feature. As the first step, the students will reflect individually what "happiness" means for them, and they will then compare their concepts with those of their classmates in order to find out what "happiness" means for people of their home culture. The students' task will be to agree on images which, according to them, best represent the concept of "happiness" in their culture. The fact that "Glück" is not easily translatable into other languages adds to the difficulty of this step. In Spanish, "Glück" has a variety of possible translations: "suerte", "felicidad" or "alegría". How will the Spanish students define these terms and which images will they choose for each of them? In our first project meeting in Granada, both sides will have to present their images and justify their selection. In multicultural groups, the students will analyse similarities and differences with respect to the concept of "happiness" in Germany and Spain. On top of that, we will also focus on the question of individual, cultural and European values in our first meeting. Methodologically, we will use activities which have been developed for the German "Schulfach Glück" ("School subject "Happiness"). Based on our insight gained so far, the students will develop a photo exhibition, which will be displayed in both participating schools. After our first meeting, we will broaden our topic with respect to the question to what extent there are differences in the concepts of happiness between different generations. In order to investigage this, the students will design interview questions and carry out interviews with people from different generations, i.e. classmates, parents and grandparents. They will then evaluate these interviews and prepare presentations about their results for our second project meeting in Ravensburg. Our focus for this meeting will be whether the differences in what "Glück" means to different people are bigger on an intergenerational than on an intercultural level. As our final step, the participating students will design and record radio features in smaller, intercultural groups. These will summarise the results of our project and will serve to disseminate them via our school radios and, if possible, local radio stations. Thereby, we wish to encourage other people to think about what "happiness" means to them, too.
Happiness - who doesn't seek it? Regardless of origin, age or era - everyone seeks it, sometimes consciously, often completely unconsciously. But what does happiness actually mean? In adolescence, which is elementally marked by the search for one's own identity and by important decisions, the question of happiness usually breaks out consciously for the first time. This basic anthropological question - which was given an unexpected topicality by the parallel Corona crisis - is what we pursued in our project. A personally responsible way of life oriented towards conscious values helps to successfully master crises. This (re)recollection of common values will be of decisive importance for the future of Europe. Together with 24 Spanish and 24 German students from grade 10 to K2 (aged 16-18), we approached the topic of happiness from an intercultural perspective and disseminated our findings in two audio contributions - on the one hand for the school community within the framework of the Spanish school radio, and on the other hand for the general public within the framework of the podcast "Ortswechsel" ("Change of Place") of our school sponsor Katholische Freie Schule der Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart. At the beginning of the project, the participating pupils got to know each other in several virtual project meetings due to the Corona restrictions and first explored what "happiness" means to them on an individual level, in the context of mutual interviews. Following this, they then explored the notion of "happiness" prevalent in their culture together with their fellow students at home. To do this, they first created interview questions for a "happiness survey", then divided these into categories and used them for interviews with Spanish and German young people from their environment. Already during the interviews and the preparation of the survey it became clear that our concepts of "happiness" are at least partly culturally bound. This is already reflected in the terminology, insofar as there is no clear equivalent for the term "happiness" in Spanish. In a project day at the German school, the participants then prepared the previous results for our student body in the context of morning circles in grades 5-10. These activities formed the basis for our first project meeting in Ravensburg. In addition to exploring Ravensburg and the Lake Constance region, the students worked together on the topic of "happiness" in a three-day happiness workshop conducted by a trainer from the "School Subject Happiness" (German "Schulfach Glück"). Among other things, scientifically based findings from happiness research - also in international comparison - were discussed with each other, and practical exercises were carried out that encouraged the pupils to reflect on their idea of a good, happy life. In the second project meeting in Granada, the diverse cultural activities that gave the German pupils insights into the culture and lifeworld of the Spanish were reflected and disseminated in a joint radio report on the Spanish school radio. An important insight for the pupils was that despite all the differences, the similarities in the two countries' ideas of happiness predominate. While family and friends, as well as values such as community and freedom are elementary for both sides, it became clear that values such as spontaneity, inclusion and openness have a greater significance in the Spanish context. In the final step, three German participants recorded a podcast contribution that is freely accessible. The crowning finale of our project was an Erasmus+ evening at the German partner school, where the participants presented the most important results to the interested public and received their certificates. In addition, Prof. Dr. Kunstmann from the PH Weingarten gave a lecture on the topic of "Ways to Happiness".