The covid sanitary crisis has created and unfortunately still creates lots of anxiety. To face this difficult period we would like to open new attractive perspectives for our students through creativity as a form of escapism. In order to tackle the lockdown situations it is necessary to help our students to engage in learning and recreate social ties. We want our students to keep travelling even if it does not necessarily mean physical mobility. Students, more than ever, must continue to dream, imagine, create, escape and cross borders - whether they are real or imaginary. Our projet which is entitled "A Journey into Creative Writing" will lead our students through a journey of workshops revolving around creative writing - in the tradition of English speaking countries. It will offer our students the opportunity to create and interact with their European peers. Together they will create a small bimonthly magazine, publish an anthology of their writings at the end of the project, read out their productions and make a podcast out it, organize a hackathon (a hackathon for school is both a competition and a challenge which aims at creating an output in a limited amount of time. It is centred on team work. Hackathons give students a unique opportunity to merge their creative ideas with their technical skills to build something new and exemplary). This project will motivate our students and strenghthen their language skills among others while developing their sentiment of belonging to the European Union.
We wished to meet different needs with the implementation of this project. First and foremost, it seemed very important to us to motivate the students again, to engage them into studying, discovering the world and face the future peacefully. Furthermore we were pursuing the same goal as in the previous projects we participated in which was to encourage the understanding of different cultures, the building of a common European identity and to promote tolerance. Thanks to the different activities we proposed we expected students to exchange, communicate, build things together, create things together. Also, we wanted to create social bonds again, after the experience of the lockdown even if it would only be virtual relationships. It seemed crucial to us to encourage students to also recreate social bonds at school (in their own schools), working in groups to take part in the activities before exchanging with the foreign students. Finally our goal was to strengthen our students’ language skills, using a foreign language to communicate but also to sublimate it.
We decided to organize this project as we saw that our students were quite shaken by the recent experience of the lockdown and that they lacked motivation. They seemed to experience difficulties to focus and work and felt a certain uneasiness towards the future. The coordinators from the three different countries had already worked together implementing projects that included mobilities. We knew that mobilities were not possible right away and we thought that the partnerships for creativity were an interesting means to motivate our students. This would participate in our effort to build international connections for our students while putting mobilities on the side for a while Furthermore we thought that organizing creative writing workshops would help the students to continue creating, dreaming and hoping for a better future and thus help them face the difficult period. As foreign languages teachers we thought it was a good idea to show our students that languages were a great means to communicate but that languages could also be used in a artistic way and they were great material to play around with.