We wanted to increase the internationality of our school and our teaching staff's multicultural skills and understanding of foreign cultures, as well as to have more international contacts. This KA1 project also served the now ended KA229 project, whose project partners we chose to be Job shadowing schools for this project. We wanted to increase the readiness of our personnel to work in cooperation with international partners and improve the participants' language skills and cultural understanding and skills to work in international projects. We wanted to increase the professionalism of our teaching staff by getting new ideas to develop teaching methods and practices. We also wanted to share our expertise and the teaching methods we use with other European schools. One of the goals was also to promote the tolerance and intercultural skills of our teaching staff and students.
Pohjankartano school is the largest middle school in Oulu. Half of our students study in music classes. Our school is involved in organizing additional teaching for students who, for one reason or another, have not received a post-graduate study place after elementary school. A significant number of additional teaching students come from immigrant background. Our school has long experience with multidisciplinary learning units already since 2000 in the form of multi-subject projects implemented at different grade levels. For years, the international perspective has been emphasized in the migration project of seventh graders. Over the years, the Pohjankartano school has had many international activities. We have been involved in e.g. the eJournal project with India, several Comenius projects, Hangzhou sister school project and also in the Erasmus+ KA229 project (2019-22). In addition, Pohjankartano's choir does international cooperation by receiving foreign choirs and making choir visits abroad. Our school has occasionally had also a preparatory education class.