Our main goal was to bring about a change in our students’ outlook and responsibility towards Sustainable Development. The project would also allow us to manage and streamline the actions that our teachers were already doing and, most importantly, give us the opportunity to learn from international partners new strategies to improve and complement what we were already doing in our centre. We set out to work in the two aspects of the Agenda 2030 that we could actually have an impact: environmental sustainability and social inclusion. As far as environmental sustainability is concerned, we wanted to engage our students in the assessment of sustainable and non-sustainable practices taking place at school and suggest improvements to those deemed not good enough. As for the goal of social inclusion, we intended students to understand that we all have a place in our society; that we all belong together, regardless of our background, believes, gender or any other aspect that can identify us, but never separate us. We would resort to NGOs already working in these areas and develop learning-service projects in which our students can co-lead their initiatives in liaison with these experts.
CEIP San José de Calasanz is an infant and primary school attended by over 400 students. It is a Bilingual School adhered to the MEC-BC Integrated Curriculum since 2006. Ours is a rural environment and, apart from a strong primary sector, our town has an important service sector as the head of our county and a growing industry. Students’ backgrounds vary greatly and approximately 30% of our students come from an immigrant background. This is the 4th International Project for our school, after a Comenius Project and 2 Erasmus Projects. All of them were based upon linguistic skills and the development of diverse learning strategies. By the time we applied for this project, several of our schoolteachers had been learning about the Agenda 2030 and carrying out initiatives in their learning sessions. In this project, we galvanised all these efforts and attempted to strengthen our foothold on sustainable development, addressing two of its main drives: environmental sustainability and social inclusion, both dearly needed in our context. Pedagogically speaking, we aim to improve CLIL practice, through Sustainable Development Science Projects. We will pursue this goal through active learning strategies such as service-learning projects.