A fresh start with Erasmus+

This year, our school has been selected by the State Scholarship Foundation (IKY) to receive an Erasmus+ funding in order to run the Key Action 1 for School Education project “Breaking out of our shell to nurture global citizens”. It is among the 138 KA1 projects in Primary and Secondary Education that have been awarded a grant by the European Commission, out of a total of 425 applications.

Our project aims to increase the opportunities to bring global citizenship into our classrooms; to motivate our staff to break out of their shell and themselves become global citizens, facilitating their participation in international activities, modernising their teaching methods and tools in Citizenship Education, and improving their ICT skills and, thereby, their capacity to participate in and develop collaborative networks. The mobility activities that we have planned as part of our Citizenship Education project are expected to improve our teachers’ foreign language competences, quality of teaching/learning and understanding of practices and policies in education across countries, but also to increase their opportunities for further training, professional development and networking. Besides that, organising an introductory event in September, we aim to boost engagement and enthusiasm in pursuing our project objectives among all members of our school community, presenting them with the objectives of our mobility activities, and discussing the impact they are expected to have on our school’s strategic development.

Our project is expected to have a positive impact on all members of our school community: it will strength our school’s European dimension and promote our pupils’ development of an EU citizenship; it will improve our teachers’ and pupils’ intercultural awareness and motivate communication with peers across Europe; it will enhance our perception of professionals from different countries and trigger reflection on our own practices, as well as motivation for professional development; it will help us effectively deal with cultural diversity in our classrooms, enrich the teaching process and strengthen the impact of our Citizenship Education. In these respects, we hope to increase our capacity to nurture citizens for a sustainable society.