lunes, 28 de diciembre de 2015

The description of our project

“Spanish: a passport between cultures” is a project which involves the strategic association of three European schools: 
- IES Francisco Salzillo, Alcantarilla, Murcia, España
- Vaskivuoren lukio, Vantaa, Finlandia
- Model Experimental General Lyceum, Herakion, Creta, Grecia,

Its goal is to advance and consolidate the Spanish language as a second linguistic choice, offering a European vision of our language, not only as a means of communication, but also, as a means of cultural promotion, opening the doors of our schools to Europe so that European students can learn about our educational system, our methodology, our literature, our music, … and, at the same time, we are able to make our students become aware of the fact that they are European citizens, too. So, through the development of the linguistic competence and the technological competence we will try to put our students in touch with the young Europe which they are part of, which will open the doors for them and will let them share educative experiences that will become work experiences in the near future, as it is established in the European Strategy 20.

Bearing in mind the full priority of the development of the basic competences as the most important element, the three schools have made a plan to develop the project, whose main objectives have been: 

- Develop on the part of the Spanish students the linguistic competence in their own language, as well as a second language on the part of the students of the other two countries. 
- Integrate the use of ICTs into the teaching-learning process. 
- Build awareness of European citizens.
- Update the methodology inside the classroom.
This way, the teachers will get: 
- Direct knowledge of other educational systems. 
- Better use of the ICTs in the class.
- Development of methodological strategies in the teaching process of languages and other subjects.
- Methodological updating.
- Open management of a resource bank.

The best ones to benefit with a project with these characteristics will be the students as their involvement in the activities will let them:
- Get awareness of the cultural dimension of the Spanish as a lingua franca.
- Understand the importance of learning more than one language.
- Use the ICTs not only to communicate but also to improve their learning process.
- Build up motivation to learn and take part in the life of their schools, contributing to create an encouraging element which helps overcome aspects such as the lack of interest or the idea that learning is not part of their daily life.
- Improve their academic performance, not only of their linguistic skill of their mother tongue.

The different activities suggested in this project, such as the theatre workshop or the selfie exhibit, try to rely on class methodologies in which the student acts as an autonomous agent of his own learning process, which is the basic principle of the flipped classroom.
We also want to bring in the largest number of participants, including those students who, for socio-cultural reasons or learning difficulties, are dissociated from their school, so that the project and the activities included become a unifying element with the school where they study.

Our goal is also to develop some activities which involve a great number of teachers from the three schools so that they will find the educational context Erasmus + not only an encouraging factor but they will be also able to establish relationships which will steady beyond the project itself:
- The digital magazine.
- Good practice blog.
- The methodology supported by the new Etwinning projects, which will be widely worked on in our project. 
- The possibilities the foreign exchanges with other European schools beyond the language immersion programs relate to English bilingual teaching.

In our opinion, the impact of this project in the life of the three schools through the elaboration of some products within the Erasmus + context is crucial, since without that European context, binding and motivating for the teachers, wouldn’t be possible. In this sense, the project will help generate some guidelines to lead to a methodology and a way of understanding the inclusive teaching-learning process. This will be possible by opening our classes to European schools, by overcoming physical barriers through the formative use of the ICTs, which the students from the three schools will benefit widely from, through the synergies created amongst the partner institutions.