Teenagers growing up today are confronted with the most challenging problems of mankind, which often make them feel powerless and insignificant. Global warming and the extremely growing social disparity are only a few of these. As a stark contrast to these threats, they often turn to social media to follow individuals that seem to have exciting lives and unlimited opportunities whereas they themselves experience many restrictions. Despite the theoretically existing opportunities they see depicted in the media, young people mainly do not know how to expand their sphere of influence to tackle the problems, which control their lives. The main objective of the project is to identify, reflect on and overcome barriers that are affecting the students’ personal lives on various levels. The project shall sharpen the students' perception of boundaries encountered in their everyday lives and will help them to understand how these can have positive and negative effects on individuals. Through the international cooperation, the participants will be able to identify common interests and aims but will also reflect their personal situation from a different angle. This will not only foster understanding and tolerance among the student team but will also promote the development of strategies for becoming active and taking influence. Furthermore, the reflection of the political context will make the students realize the benefits of the EU as a community of states, and will encourage them to establish ways of future cooperation. The four international meetings planned will investigate different aspects of boundaries, starting off with "identifying boundaries". At this first meeting in Berlin, students will share their own experiences and explore the city to understand and reflect on the way boundaries influence peoples' lives. This will build the basis for understanding the impact of "political boundaries" which is the focus of the second meeting. Having reflected on political determinants that shape their lives students will then concentrate on "personal boundaries" such as cultural and language barriers in the third meeting. Finally, the focus of the last meeting will be put on different strategies of "overcoming boundaries". The project focuses on a creative, student centered approach as a basis for guided research and reflection. The students will work in multinational teams examining their personal attitudes as well as the local, national and international contexts by working on case studies, research and interviews, which then will form the basis for creative tasks like short stories, graphic novels or podcasts. As a long-lasting work of art in each school a mural will be created, which displays the projects' progress visually and includes links to digital results. Cooperative learning and inclusive education methods will be applied. The cooperating secondary education schools are from Berlin, Germany, Izola, Slovenia and Oulu, Finland. The ages of the 34 actively participating students range from 14 to 18. They will be a mix of different backgrounds and cultures as well as different social contexts including refugees. A group of 15 international, experienced teachers of various subjects will work together as an international core team and plan the details of the meetings and interim actions. During the international meetings, a significantly larger group of students, teachers and local networks of institutions will be involved and included. By using various methods and tools for cooperation, documentation and creative work in and between the meetings, the students will improve their media, research and communication competences. Through the individual and shared activities their capability of team work and critical reflection will also be fostered. Especially reflecting their personal situations in a broader context will make the students more aware of their possibilities to take influence in their communities and beyond. Also, different challenges of mastering new situations, such as conducting interviews and publishing digital content online, will serve to bolster the students’ self-esteem. The materials created, such as the project murals and the produced videos and podcasts will be disseminated in the local communities and will be used in the schools as teaching material. Our aim is a new network of collaboration both between the participating schools as well as between the involved institutions on a local and international level. This shall encourage future work together and create new projects. The students will not only gain new experiences and skills but will hopefully stay in touch with each other. This way, boundaries in the EU, which partly have risen again because of the current coronavirus crisis, shall be overcome even more easily in the future. In addition, the students will have developed an understanding of the necessity of different ways of participation in their communities and on a global level.
Although our Erasmus+ project “Overcoming boundaries” initially suffered greatly from the Covid pandemic, we were mainly able to carry out the project according to our ideas and achieve key goals. At the beginning, we faced the huge challenge that physical meetings were not yet allowed. We therefore bridged the first nine months with online meetings and explored the possibilities of digital social interaction in order to enable the participants to get to know each other and develop a team spirit from a distance. On the whole, all four planned international meetings with students were carried out, although the order had to be changed slightly due to restrictions of the pandemic. The general thematic focus was based on the needs and interests of the students but was also guided by us teachers through impulses during group work and selected excursions on the topic, which contributed to in-depth reflection on the aspects covered. At the first meeting in Berlin, the students were asked to identify boundaries and barriers that they encountered and that they found particularly stressful (identifying boundaries). Through research and on-site offers, the students became aware of numerous aspects and dealt with a wide range of topics, such as the former division of Germany, the gap between rich and poor, cultural differences, as well as psychological inhibitions and aspects of gender definition. The students had lively discussions about parallels and differences to their own lives. In these, the participants were able to train their communication skills which also helped them to become more tolerant for other concepts of life. Since we initially gave the students the freedom to choose how they would implement their results, they worked on various creative products, such as short films, podcasts, short stories, a group collage and a sculpture. This meant that the students were able to bring their personal strengths into the teamwork and we were able to respond to their main interests and plan the following meetings accordingly. At the second meeting in Oulu (personal boundaries), the students therefore took part in a workshop on film making in order to deepen their knowledge of camera technology and film editing. As a final product, they created short films about overcoming personal boundaries, which was the topic of the meeting. By dealing with sometimes very personal issues in their films, the students were able to broaden their self-awareness and find ways to overcome their own difficulties. At the meeting in Brussels, a guided role play made a significant contribution to the discussion of political boundaries, which was the topic of the third meeting. In this role play, the students took the roles of members of a fictitious party and had to convincingly present their arguments to the other students representing different parties. In addition to visits to the Parliamentarium and the House of European History, especially the personal meetings and interviews with EU representatives from their own countries were an enriching experience for the young people. The discussions and exchanges within the group helped the students to recognize the importance of political participation and encouraged them to get actively involved in their local community and beyond. At the final meeting in Izola, the focus was on reflecting, visualizing, and disseminating the results of the project (overcoming boundaries). Several artistic products were created that expressed the overcoming of different kinds of boundaries. Under the professional guidance of a local artist, all students developed and printed individual motifs for T-shirts. They contributed personal commemorative motifs to the “wall of memories,” which was built in a performance at the final presentation. In addition, one group worked as journalists and created a magazine that presents the project results from a student perspective. Also, digital postcard motifs were designed, which included a QR code opening a website that shows photographs and films from all project meetings. That way the recipients of these postcards could gain a lively insight into the project results. At a formal final event, all results were presented to a large audience and the students reported on their experiences in the project. In the long term, the project primarily helped to strengthen the students' self-confidence and communicative and social skills and lead to an increase in their tolerance. The critical self-awareness that the students were able to develop through the diverse encounters and experiences enabled the students not only to improve their own self-perception, but also their self-efficacy, finding ways to overcome their individual boundaries and understanding the impact of political decisions on constructing and destructing barriers.