As with the previous project, our goal was above all to motivate our students to learn French, to cultivate cultural exchange with French people of the same age and to overcome inhibitions in making contact with another culture. The project aimed to show them ways of shaping their lives from a European perspective, independent of national and language borders. Besides enriching the personal development of the participants, the project was important for us as a way to show everyone involved, as well as other students, teachers and the public, how important and beneficial international cooperation can be to a school. In this project, which ran throughout the school year, the students also took part in activities using digital and virtual tools, which were then always linked back to manual, analogue work. In this way the students were able to explore the possibilities of using professional media as well as the risks of digital spaces and the protective measures to counter these risks. The content of these activities aimed to foster an environmental consciousness among the students and expose them to sustainable and healthy eating habits.
We are a long way from France here in the Mecklenburgischer Schweiz. Our students have little contact with the French language in their everyday lives, let alone with native speakers, and they can have difficulty motivating themselves to learn the language. Lots of students drop French after the 10th grade, but for many years we have still had individual students from our 9th and 10th grades taking part in the Sauzay exchange programme run by the DFJW. However, many of our students are lacking in confidence and anxious at the prospect of spending three months living in another country, and we are therefore happy to have been able to offer an exchange programme with our French partners in Soyaux for the past three years. Through this programme our students have had the chance to use their foreign language skills in authentic situations, turning the language into a concrete, useful tool. The project was carried out over a whole school year and included our mobility to France as well as the visit of our exchange partners in return. Our partner school also worked with a school in Vienna on the same topic, and this mutual twin-space enabled us to end the project by producing a trinational piece of work.