We wanted to achieve a greater understanding of how we can work with inclusion at our school. We have a school with a large student diversity and students with different cultural backgrounds. We have a new curriculum where inclusion, coping and global citizenship are central elements. We want to see how schools in other parts of Europe work with this. We also want our students and staff to see their own society in an expanded perspective. By building international relations, we want our students and staff to increase their linguistic and cultural competence. We selected partner countries where we offer teaching in the foreign languages; France, Germany and Spain. We want the language teachers to be able to practice the language and gain an insight into the education system in other countries. During the application period, some of our partners have become unsuitable to work with, because our contact persons changed jobs, or did not want further cooperation. Much of this is due to the pandemic.
For several years, we have worked with internationalization at Hamar Cathedral School and we have experienced that it has had great benefits both for pupils and staff here at the school. In a globalized world, it is important to have an international orientation and an area of focus for Innlandet county council is international cooperation. We want to see how the rest of Europe works with the inclusion of students in the classroom with large academic and social variations and we want to update ourselves on languages and see how language teaching takes place in other countries. In addition, it is important for us to have international cooperation and contacts in Europe. That is why we applied for this project.