This KA2 project involves three countries from north (Denmark), central (Germany) and south (Spain) of Europe. The project partners met before in eTwinning projects and KA1 mobilities so that they had an idea about each others school culture. All three schools have in common that they focus on STEM and sustainability in their school development but want to expand their knowledge and experience on a more international level. Therefore the idea to do a KA229 School Exchange Partnership developed and was discussed with all the project partners. The main objectives of this project are not just involving students in a European project setting and thus learning a lot about different cultures but also to focus on our school profile in terms of STEM and sustainability concentrating on what is happening on a local level and taking these results to discuss them on a global meta-basis. Apart from cultural, scientific and environmental objectives, underprivileged students should also get the opportunity to show their strengths, motivation and interest in scientific projects independently of their backgrounds. There will be four teachers organising the entire project and taking the lead on the activities and planning, which are two teachers from Spain, and one each from Germany and Denmark. For the students mobilities there will be eight students travelling with two teachers from each country. In Denmark and Spain a total of 16 students will be involved in the project, however only 8 of them will go to on foreign country each. In Germany due to the set up of the class, the eight students will travel to both countries. Students' profile were paid explicit attention to in terms of underprivileged students coming from a migration background, poor socio-economic backgrounds and also supporting girls to participate. Teachers involved do not only teach STEM subjects but are also fulfilling coordinative tasks at the schools, so they will have a higher impact on their colleagues and school development. To achieve the objectives of the project we planned five Learning Teaching Training events. Starting and ending with a teacher meet-up of the group of four teachers organising the project, the first one should take place in Luxembourg, the second one in The Hague. The teacher events should frame the whole project bringing experience from each system into the partnership and also taking results back into each system. The core activities in the project will be the three student meet-ups in all three participating countries. There, different local environmental aspects, like waste disposition, regional natural areas etc. will be looked at and discussed with local partners (like city hall). That way students not only learn about their local regions, but will also be able to transfer results on a meta-level taking a more European perspective on sustainability and the environment. The focus of the tasks during the exchanges will be on UN sustainability goals for 2030, thus taken as a reference. The methodology used depends on the aspect of the project that is looked at. There will be several digital tools being used to coordinate as well as communicate within the project such as Trello, Google Drive, eTwinning, Skype. The methodology used for the actual students exchanges will be based on actual field trips and experimental sights as well as exchange through communication with local but also international foci. A short-term goal is for our students to gain more knowledge and realness for different landscapes, culture, environments based on data that has been found in the project. It's also a short-term goal for them to build new connections by using English as lingua franca. In the long run we hope to continue with exchanges, continue working in eTwinning and have an international profile that is also based on all data collected within the project. Note: Due to COVID19 we had to change our timetable from 12 to 13 months which is a time frame we hope to be able to meet. If there will be ongoing problems considering travel plans with COVID19 we might have to adjust it further.
This project has its origin in 2017, when the schools from the three countries were considering the internationalization of their curricula. The main idea of this internationalization was to give our European students the opportunity to open up to Europe from their local reality. Initially we set out an environmental project in English to be able to share it with other European students and compare the local initiatives for sustainability. We all realized at that time that we had few contacts at European level to develop it. Having previously developed other projects with these partners, we considered that initiating another project with them should be successful. In this way, our collaboration could grow beyond collaborations between teachers (KA1 Project) and involve our students too. This project addressed environmental and sustainability issues in the context of UN Sustainability Development Goals (SDG) in our three countries. More precisely, we wished to address the similarities and the differences between this type of initiatives taking place in our three cities and our three countries. To accomplish this we travelled to Germany, Denmark and Spain. Moreover, the three partners opened up this project for all students, and special attention was paid to gender equality and also to the socioeconomical level of the students (equal opportunities).