The Project

Project registration number: 2019-1-CZ01-KA229-061113

Project is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union

We would like to show our students how varied and colourful our world is and make them enthusiastic about cultural traditions which each country has. Since we strongly believe that cultural traditions, customs and habits make us the nations we are. At this time when euro-scepticism is growing across Europe, it is the time to show young people that to be different (for example in culture, traditions, customs and habits, crafts etc.) can be beautiful and that on the contrary, we can find a lot of cultural heritage similarities which prove that it is worth staying together in one political and social union, in European Union. We wish to have the possibility to let our students tell their schoolmates, friends and families about cultural traditions of other countries to support not only cultural tourism but also EU citizenship awareness to prevent strengthening political movements leading to „new Brexits“.

Partner schools

• Vordingborg Gymnasium og HF, Vordingborg, Denmark
  https://vordingborg-gym.dk/                                                                                                       
• IES Joaquin Turina, Madrid, Spain                                                                                            
• ACADEMIA MERCURII, soukromá střední škola, Náchod,                                 Czech Republic             http://amnachod.cz/                                                                                                                   
• Sacred Heart Minor Seminary, Victoria, Gozo, Malta

At this time when Euro-scepticism is growing across Europe, we as teachers feel the necessity and the responsibility to foster EU citizenship awareness and positive attitudes to it in our students and local communities. We aim to foster them through sharing cultural heritage of the participating countries to educate and remind especially our young people of the importance to respect and protect all cultural heritage, as we are strongly convinced that our heritage shapes our identity and attitudes both national and European. Helping and encouraging the youth to create a positive attitude to European citizenship through cultural heritage and helping our students to understand other cultures is an important challenge for us. Knowing better history, traditions, languages and culture of other European countries helps us to construct our identity of an European citizen and a sense of belonging to Europe.
For our project, we found it important to include schools from different regions of Europe which cultures are not alike so that students can find significant cultural differences. About 60 students will get the opportunity to travel (per meeting there will be 4-6 students from every country accompanied by 2 teachers) aged 12-18 years.
Teachers will have the unique opportunity to share their knowledge and skills too. During short-term staff trainings, three teachers per each school will be trained in dropping out prevention methodologies and in digital skills through the training of ICT tools use with the emphasis on eTwinning and Twinspace.

But the main objective of our project is to raise the interest of our pupils in valorizing and respecting cultural heritage of participants‘ countries and to raise their European citizenship awareness. Along with, we aim to promote the acquisition of skills, competences and attitudes of both students and teachers. More in specific, our project aims to increase students' intercultural competences, to enhance multilingualism by teaching and learning English (which is the main language of the project for communication and project activities) and Spanish languague (activities done in Spanish will be a part of each students meeting, as Spanish is taught in all the schools), to foster digital skills of both, students and teachers by the use of eTwinning, Twinspace, Kahoot, Instagram and other ICT tools during the project; to increase the self-confidence of our students, to decrease the level of early school leaving in our schools by promoting new dropping out prevention methodology, to observe and then to use more innovative and activating didactis for teachers, to create new didactic material in 5 languages and above all to challenge Euroscepticism by boosting European citizenship awareness through sharing the value of European cultural heritage among students, local communities and wider public.We also wish to create a network of schools for further projects of European cooperation.

We would like to show our students as much of cultural heritage of each participant country as possible, trying to highlight representative examples of various fields of cultural heritage including some UNESCO World Heritage sites or other historical monuments, crafts, famous paintings, music, traditional cuisine, literature, rural architecture or museums of history which will be supported by various workshops. We will also meet local politicians who will speak to the students explaining them the importance of European citizenship which will be supported by series of workshops and activities (including Twinspace video conference of students) to positively influence the attitudes of our students towards European citizenship. The combination of the knowledge of cultural heritage of European countries and activities promoting the proud feeling of being an European citizen will lead to the rise of European citizenship awareness of our students and hopefully will also affect their families and local communities.

All project results will continue their lives after the end of the EU funding on our Twinspace project webpages containing our project brochures, press releases, logo, posters, links to videos/vlogs, Kahoot quiz etc. Brochures will also be provided to public in centres for teachers‘ education, in local tourist information centres and offered for sharing with public in local communities or associations to foster sharing the cultural heritage of participant countries and positive attitudes of local people to
European citizenship. Lesson materials or the language survival kit can be used in lessons of any teacher as all the material will be open to public (along with dropping out prevention methodology materials) through our Twispace webpages.

We strongly believe that our project activities will lead to higher European citizenship awareness in our communities, as we are convinced that sharing the value of European cultural heritage unites us and makes us believe in European citizenship.