Comenius January Preparatory Meeting

We have now completed the week of preparatory meetings for the application for a Comenius Project to start in September of this year.

The meeting was held this last week, the 13^th to the 19^th. At the beginning of the week those in attendance were;

Dominika Owsiany (Poland and co-ordinator for this project)

Katrin Mulcahy and Birgit Mehnert (Germany)

Susanne Kallanvaara and Nina Larsson (Sweden)

Nikos Ekonomou and Georgia (Greece)

Susanne and Nina had to leave on Thursday due to the fact they had booked their flights as cheaply as possible and it would have been too expensive for them to have stayed longer.

On Wednesday at midday Stella Lantsia arrived from Cyprus. She had been unable to attend the meeting from the beginning of the weed given her obligations in school in Cyprus but was able to attend the end of the week staying till Saturday.

Finally all the participants left us on Friday in order to be in Barcelona for Friday night because their flights left early on Saturday morning and the connections by train from Tortosa would not have allowed them to catch their flights in time had they stayed here on Friday evening.

Agenda and work:

The purpose of the meeting was the planning of our project but more specifically the completion of the application for the project that has to be completed and handed in before February 15^th (I have checked this date with Nuria Estrada)

Monday

Whilst we had a full agenda we did not really follow what was specified in it. The first full day of work was more a contact session in which people described the situation of their schools and introduced themselves to each other. We loosely discussed the possible contents of the project and what we wanted it to address. It was decided that the project ought to address stereotypes and national prejudices and promote open mindedness among out students. To this end we made a rough list of the possible activities that could be included over the two year period.

During this day we did discover that there are fundamental differences between the schools of the different countries and that some of these can and will create difficulties among the project members. For example, in Sweden it is illegal for schools to ask the students to contribute money to any school activity; this therefore means that any and all students that they wish to have participating in the project will need to be funded entirely from the money allocated to them. In addition the school in Sweden is located in an area populated principally by immigrants, whey have over 50% immigrants for their students, and so it would be difficult for them to ask students to have foreign students staying at home with them on an exchange visit. Similarly the German school is in an area where many of the students have to come to school by public transport, travelling up to an hour each time, and so would also find it difficult to organise places for students to stay in homes.

In the afternoon of Monday we started to check the national information that we had all provided for the application. Dominika placed great emphasis on the fact that the application had to be identical for all countries involved. As co-ordinator she has to present the application to her Agency in Polish and in English, as associates we will all have to present it only in English.

This done we then proceeded to fill in the rest of that application. Dominika explained to us that the applications are rated on a points system, out of 100, and then this is taken into account along with other factors such as the projects that each school has or hasn’t already completed etc. It was also commented that it is perfectly possible for one or more of the schools participating in our project to not be approved and that in this case there is nothing we can do. She did also mention that we still have three more schools, from Italy, Rumania and Turkey, which could potentially participate in the project. It was decided that should these schools complete the application information forms that Dominika has sent them then they should be allowed to participate given that it is possible that some of the schools will be rejected but that should they fail to do so we will not consider any other schools that may contact her in the meantime.

Since this meeting we have now learnt that in fact two more schools have met the application requirements and should now be considered as part of the project. These are; St. Cyril and Methodius Secondary School (Bulgaria) our contact there is with Svetla Ivanova and the IIS Albert Einstein (Italy), where we are in contact with Laura Rua and Ferdinando Cabrini.

Tuesday

On Tuesday we continued with the application form. Going through the different sections and therefore at the same time deciding on the contents of the project. During the morning we decided on a schedule of visits and activities that are here in our other Comenius blog.

The two student exchanges were planned for Greece and then for Sweden so that students will have the chance to visit both the north of Europe and the South. The final student exchange is close to the period when our students of 2n Batx will be preparing for the PAU exams. In a previous meeting it had been agreed that no groups of 2n Batx would be involved in visits outside the school in this time period. It remains to be seen if this will be the case or we will need to review which age groups take part in the project.

In later discussions some of the members of the project made the comment that it had seemed that the Swedes were in fact reluctant to host the final visit in Sweden in April of 2010. If this is the case, and Dominika will ask t

hem directly once she gets back home, and they do not really want to host the visit then the suggestion is to hold the second student exchange in Germany at the start of December 2009. This is because at this time in Germany there is a Winter Christmas festival that would be marvellous for the students. If this change occurs then the final visit would be a teacher visit for project evaluation either to Sweden or to Cyprus in April 2010. Furthermore if this change happens then there would be no conflict with our students and the PAU exams and we could preserve the continuity of the project with 1r and 2b Batx.

The only other firm decision taken on Tuesday was the name of the project which is to be: “Young Europeans, alike but different.”

Wednesday

Wednesday initially was supposed to simply be the continuation of the work already started Katrina, however, immediately presented us with a document she had been able to download from her agency. This document was an annotated copy of the Comenius application form with notes on how many points each section could gain and what the contents of the section should be. With this in mind we all then decided to go over the parts of the application that we had already completed with the objective of making the necessary changes for the application to meet, as closely as possible, the description we had at our disposal. To this end we included much more detail in the description of the elements of the project so that the Programme of Work was then written out. This is available in our other Comenius blog here.

-We were able to use the remaining time available to us on Wednesday to almost complete the application, this was considered to be important given that our Swedish partners Susanne and Nina had to leave on the Thursday.

On Wednesday at midday Stella Lantsia arrived from Cyprus. At midday we had a lunch at the Casa de Fusta which was useful for all of us to be able to meet and socialise and to get to know each other better out of the work environment.

Thursday

First thing in the morning we had to decide how many movements we wanted to apply for. Each time a teacher or a student travels this is one movement. The largest packet of movements available is 24 and we soon saw that all of us needed to apply for this, the maximum quantity of movements. This discussion also concerned the question of just how many students we wanted to take on each of the student exchanges. In the end despite the Germans and myself asking to be able to take up to 15 it was decided that the optimum number would probably be 5 with the chance of some schools taking more should the circumstances permit this. As I have already mentioned these circumstances include accommodation, facilities available and things so simple as the problems of moving so many students around. We now have eight schools in the project, if all of us take five students and two teachers whenever we travel we will have to move 56 people. With more students this could become a real problem.

The rest of the time was spent revising the work we had already done for Stella’s benefit. We were able to include the information about her and her school and also to incorporate some of the ideas she gave us into the application.

The rest of the day was spent completing the needed parts of the application in sufficient detail so that on the whole we were able to conclude that we had completed the work for which we had arranged to meet during this week.

In the afternoon we made a final critical evaluation of the work done and we made sure that there was nothing missing from the application.

In the evening we all attended a supper that had been organised between the Comenius group and a group of local teachers which was a good chance for the members of the group to meet a group of teachers not directly related to our school.

Friday

On Friday the group decided that due to problems with train times and the early flights they had to catch on Saturday it would be easier for them to go up to Barcelona during the day and then to stay there for Friday night in order to be able to catch their flights on Saturday morning.

Summary

In conclusion I think that we have an excellent chance of our application being approved because we have been fortunate in being able to tailor our application to their demands. In addition we now also have a Bulgarian school and a Cypriot school and these are areas which increase the possibilities of the application being approved

The next step is that Dominika has to redact the final version of the application and send a copy to all of us. We then have to hand in our application before the 15^th of February. Once this has been done we have to wait till June to find out if we have been approved and also how many of our partners have been approved.

It remains to be decided exactly when we communicate the project to the students and exactly to which group of students we direct it.