An innovative project

EUtopia is a project that emerges from the analysis of the demand and request of our partner schools to achieve a goal for a better Europe. The intention is to collaborate to achieve competence and meaningful learning of our students.

EUtopia will be innovative:

The European Union Commission aims to get better results in all the subjects within 2020. Our project has complementary and regenerating skills to equally contribute in the EU project.

The basis of our project is the use of cross curricular skills. As a field well suited for this kind of approach the filming of a documentary can provide a kind of experiential knowledge, while at the same time allows students to experiment in an international project.

The intention is to organize a collaborative analysis of six European schools to achieve a common goal. It will analyse and compare important issues such as social exclusion, early school dropout, health, immigration and environment.

It will be a record of where and who we are, with different national traits and languages being seen and heard, even if the final single product could be a good summary of what we studied. The assumption of the creation will bring various historical and social attributes together for each participant school and country. The film will be a unique development that has been created by the students, for the students, and will show the places where they live and, through its creation, the differences and similarities that they share, learning to make decisions by consensus, overcoming challenges and collaborating with their partners, leaving aside prejudice and being tolerant, cooperative and enthusiastic and discovering therefore the importance of communicating in English.

The creation of EUtopia teams in each country will serve to strengthen the aim in the students understanding and knowledge of the problem and their characteristics. Through the visits for workshops and the final product creation, all people involved will be able to see and experience at first hand the variety of realities, culture and languages that are present within the European Union. The tasks involved in the workshops and making of the final product will be varied.

The teaching of skills will be different from what the students learn in their own schools, seeing that the resources and ideas in each country will be different. They will have to adapt to differences in ideas and ways of working and this will be an exciting challenge to them, and will give them an insight of what is possible for future projects and employment.

At the end of the project a collaborative documentary will record the six parts elaborated and reflect our vision of Europe 2020.

For this work, positive communication and cooperation will have to be developed between all the countries involved meaning that the students will have to improve their English and acquire very good ICT skills. The use of E-twinning, E-mail, blog, website and other social media will have to be learnt. Any communication will be planned during the project development.

Students will achieve a better understanding of history, culture and traditions of other European countries (improvement of multicultural competence) and their own.

Moreover, EUtopia is sided by European projects in which our centres had previously worked:

Italy, Spain and Turkey (along with five other countries) previously attended a Comenius partnership. The “HIP” (History in the Present) goal was to learn about the history and heritage of the different EU countries that collaborated together. Both EUtopia and HIP projects are corresponding and promoting an awareness of the importance of cultural and linguistic diversity in Europe as we need to eliminate racism, prejudice and xenophobia where mobility will help to break down barriers for integration and end with the possible reticence to work with foreign partners.

 Latvia undertook the project “Footprints’’. It was about handling of waste, natural resources, food and energy. The extension will be a healthy diet and all activities connected with it like research on the food pyramid, how to make healthy food at home, economic lessons, visiting organic farms, taking part in harvesting etc.

Poland contributed to the project “C Code to Common Future”. It was devoted to raising awareness of the environmental issues among the students in the participating five countries from different cultures and aimed at developing good practices and promoting sustainable eco-friendly development in each country. Some experience from that project could be shared with new partners.

The Greek partners do not have experience with the Comenius project for secondary, however they do have it in the one for primary.