FOOD. What a universal theme. It gathers people and unites with a unique sense of belonging leading to an understanding of what is common and shared worldwide. It also enriches knowledge, opens us to cultural differences thanks to each region’s specificities. In short, food is a medium for enhancing European cultural awareness and knowledge, alerting to environment, world’s issues and inequalities and developing social skills and scientific methods. For all these reasons, it appears obvious that food is a relevant topic filled with opportunities for us to work on. We have chosen to work on chocolate as it presents many interests from scientific to popular ones. In order to show diversity and so that every partner seizes the project and brings its own particularities, chocolate will be made with different fillings. We are four school involved. One school is in France and its filling is Burgundy’s specialty: the blackcurrant. The Unesco labeled school in Slovenia works on the flower of salt from the world famous Piran Salt Pans. Guadeloupe’s school chooses their local pineapple. The fourth school, an Italian Eco-school brings its olive specialty to the chocolates. All these filled chocolates will be in the final product: a chocolate box. We are very lucky to be surrounded by experts to see through this project: chefs (a cook, a pastry chef and a chocolatier), a flavourist, farmers, a marketing engineer and obviously teachers, school administration staff. They all responded with enthusiasm to our request to take part in the project. The students’ selection for this project is made by interviews with students and consultations with teachers. We aim at selecting 80 (20 per country) motivated teenagers, interested in languages and science. Furthermore, this opportunity is also addressed to 30 pupils (7 or 8 per country) facing educational difficulties. We believe such a project is a chance for some students to cling back to school, develop important skills and increase their self-worth. It is of major importance for us to offer a Learning by doing perspective throughout all activities. This teaching method develops interest, motivation and skills and lead to the assimilation of the project. Activities tackle different themes such as: - scientific experiments (distillation, extraction, fermentation, etc.), - environmental matters, agriculture, sustainable consumption and production patterns, - career guidance with the discovery of many professional fields, - technology, design, art and crafts with the making of the box for instance, - communication, collaboration and dissemination with the use of ICT and languages to develop a real link thanks to Etwinning which is a key tool to the project. We have based our project on two main objectives: social and educational value of European heritage and increasing of the levels of achievement and interest in science, engineering and mathematics. It also includes the development of other key competences. Their achievement is both ambitious and doable and really fits to our project. These objectives also are substantial and relevant to our pupils’ curriculum and self development. To assess the achievement and impact of our project, in addition to final tasks and skill-based grids, we plan on developing self-assessment and co-assessment so that pupils are aware of their progress and feel active and trustworthy. The use of Badges to attest on someone’s success and progress is a great way to increase self confidence, recognition of assets and work of each pupil. These innovative and entertaining digital badges are a proof and a guarantee of the good development of the project and certify everyone has worked and achieved skills (not necessarily the same ones or at the same time as it implies everyone has their own ways to progress - a key value to us). Working with vocational schools, associations and professionals, all related to our main topics (food and science) develops callings for various professional fields and broadly benefit to everyone’s cultural openness, knowledge and skills. It is also a chance to strengthen links between our schools and partners. All in all we aim at reaching up to 500 people (school staff, professionals, pupils and families). In the long term we plan on disseminating our work to a larger group. Videos, tutorials, recipe books, photo-reports will be sent via the use of online media and print media and interventions to a wider community: schools and institution resource banks in order to give value and pride to our students and contribute to other people. We also consider promoting and celebrating Erasmus projects by taking part in Erasmus Days, European Days and Earth Day. Looking at our commitment, we are already convinced that the four schools involved in this project will keep in touch and keep working together afterwards with the use of Etwinning and consider future projects
Our project was about chocolate in general and this topic was a perfect chance to discover many things about food, from growing, transforming to cooking and selling. The project started on the Twinspace : introducing oneself, speaking about schools, cities (Vlogs, reports…), we used the chat and the forum, shared documents.... Pupils learnt to download pictures, transfer, share, shoot and edit a video, create engaging documents, modify their size or format… It was the perfect occasion to do some prevention about screen time and social networks (cyberbullying, fake news, quality of sleep…). We taught them to respect copyright. We developped their digital knowledge. After the COVID crisis, we detected a great lack of motivation, we had to remotivate our pupils and give them a reason to engage in school. Working in a project made their learnings more tangible, more useful on a daily basis. We worked on different subjects : English, science, technology, food and health…We organized peer to peer tutoring which enhanced students' engagement, communication, and independence skills. Example of what we did : -culinary workshop to test the transformation of ingredient and raw food (distillation, cooking methods…) -treasure hunt with scientific challenges, riddles in English to discover job such as pastry chef, chocolatier, scientist chocolate development… -tasting workshop to undertsand our 5 senses, the reaction of our body when eating -presentation before, after the mobilities or the visits to farms, museums… Everybody had the chance to demonstrate their inner skills because they could use different types of intelligence (logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial…). The cooperation between peers boosted fields of study and study pathway. Pupils became aware that they were able to do so many things, it triggered questions, forced them to think outside the box…Pupils were able to use their newly aquired knowledge and autonomy to face daily problems. We organized all the mobilities planned in our application, it was punctuated by visits, joint work, workshops and moments of conviviality. It was an opportunity to discover other ways of life and to pursue the development of transversal skills (autonomy, Modern Languages...). There was an awareness of European citizenship: understanding of the diversity of peoples, cultures, rich heritage, and the importance of mobility in personal development. Air travel was an opportunity to work on our carbon footprint. Penpaling and mobilities forced us to use strategies to get round any communication difficulties : use of online translator, dictionaries, a third language… it was a way of playing down and allowed everybody to dare communicate and take confidence to be open to other people. For teachers : reinforcement of skills, workshop to use apps, websites in order to create various, new motivating activities, discovering the concept of gamification. In addition to having been trained in the gamification that allows good mastery of the computer tool (see Part A), we have observed a professional decompartmentalization with the understanding of the content/requirements (national programs) of other subjects and a development of : -knowledge of the subject of the project -communication strategies (remote/face-to-face, team reasoning, debating) -methods of evaluation, promotion/dissemination: encouraging creativity, making the student an actor => depending on the activities, they have been guides, journalists, artists, chefs, scientists... They have been evaluated according to the criteria of the CEFR and validated levels A2 and B1 thanks to certifications -skills in foreign languge to correspond and organize mobility with partners. The desire to continue in this direction is demonstrated by the writting of a new Erasmus application with training seminars in English. The good success of the project has given our schools the ambition to pursue Erasmus projects, or more modestly but just as effectively, interdisciplinary projects.