By visiting other countries and inviting visitors to our school, we wanted to offer our students opportunities to increase understanding between cultures. Visits to another country, even so that you can become a part of the everyday life of a family from another culture, have been very educational and encouraging experiences for our students in the past. In addition, receiving guests has increased young people's responsibility and awareness of the special features of our own culture, not to mention the impact of visits on students' motivation in terms of language learning. We wanted to offer more of these opportunities to our students. We have actively searched for information about sustainable development through teacher training, which has, unfortunately, been slowed down during the past year because of the corona virus. Now we have found possible partner schools from different parts of Europe, and we hoped that through these student visits we could develop cooperation with them also in relation to sustainable development goals. The third goal was to find different ways to improve the feeling of belonging to a group among the students and staff in our school.
We are a lower secondary school from Northern Finland, with students in grades 7-9. The number of students is currently around 520. The students come from the area around the school and they are 12-16 years of age. The children and young people living in the vicinity of our school come from very different socio-economic backgrounds, and from both urban and rural environments. In addition, we have some students from Haparanda town on the Swedish side. Immigrant students in the city of Tornio usually belong to our school district. In recent years, our challenges have been the creation of a smooth everyday school life (taking into account the students' different backgrounds), the development of sustainability, and the development of the school's social competence and joint activities. Our school has a large number of students and the school building itself is fragmented, and we don't have space to gather together with all of our students and staff at the same time. This brings a challenge to the organization of joint events and the participation of students. This is why we need other ways to improve our school's team spirit.