The project had three fundamental objectives: 1. Connect the local and regional environment in which our students are part of with a broader European and global one. 2. Get students to value the historical, cultural and linguistic heritage of their environment and that of the reception center as belonging to the same legacy that goes back to classical antiquity. 3. Develop in students the communication and digital skills and abilities that our current globalized world demands, both at an educational level and in their professional future. When we devised the project, one of the great shortcomings that we detected in our students was the difficulties they had in geographically locating places so close in language, culture and history, such as the southern region of Italy and the island of Sicily, in particular. We hoped to achieve, therefore, an improvement in the knowledge of the European geographical reality, while transmitting the idea of closeness or cultural kinship with Italy and Sicily. We also hoped to achieve an improvement in the linguistic communication skills of our students, seeing themselves in an environment with a language other than Spanish.
Our school is located in a town and region (Vélez-Málaga and Axarquía) whose main activities are agriculture and tourism. Being ours the dean educational center in the area, with almost sixty years of experience, the diversity of students that are formed in it is very wide. For this reason, we intend to offer with this project a way of internationalization that allows students to better contextualize our identity as a small community within the much broader European spectrum in which it is inserted. In this sense, we understood that the fundamental need that had to be covered was the contact of our students with other countries, languages and cultures. This relationship of cultural, linguistic and social exchange should contribute to meeting the learning needs that students require today, and that the Erasmus+ program facilitates, developing values that we consider essential for their development as students, people and European citizens.