The objectives were: to raise awareness among students and teachers of the importance of the European Union, to promote active citizenship and to raise awareness of the importance of a common European identity, values and citizenship: we wanted to make students and teachers aware that we are all active European citizens, with the power to decide and shape the society in which we live. We wanted to raise awareness of our common European identity and our shared values, our common history and European cultural heritage and the importance of environmental protection for EU society as a whole. By promoting and strengthening foreign language competences, we wanted to enable students to follow lessons in a foreign environment of an EU Member Countries, where they could use the target foreign language actively and follow the content of the lessons and carry out the tasks. Teachers who did job shadowing were encouraged to strengthen their awareness of the importance and necessity of multilingualism and had the opportunity to broaden their knowledge of the methodology and didactics of language and other subject teaching and to observe classroom dynamics.
In the school year 2022/23, we have introduced two EU-related activities at the school: the Active Citizenship project for third-year pupils and the EU Ambassador School project, which involves pupils from different year groups, and in particular pupils from the newly created "Euro Department". As the school has never systematically dealt with EU topics (but they are of course present in a fragmentary way in different subjects: geography, sociology, history, foreign languages), we wanted to broaden our knowledge about the functioning of the EU, its institutions and the identity of Europe and its citizens by looking at how these topics are dealt with in European schools. For years, our school has been promoting multilingualism among students and teachers (we organised foreign language courses for the latter a few years ago). We teach English (first foreign language), German, French, Spanish (second or third foreign languages) and Italian and Russian (third foreign languages). We wanted to give students and teachers the opportunity to use the languages actively in authentic settings and situations and to compare the two school systems (the host school.