Bearing in mind what we have said previously, the universal topic and the need to rely on a multidisciplinary and international team in order to achieve our goals, we found that the Erasmus+ programme was the best tool to shape this project. We decided to choose a KA2 programme, Strategic Partnerships for the Knowledge and Exchange of Good Practices, because it enabled us to provide it with a clear, realistic, practical and assessable structure in accordance with the quality criteria established in the European programmes. This kind of programmes has allowed us to count on the students’ mobilities, as we worked with them at the same time, implementing the didactic material on the one hand and checking the scope and transcendence of the methodological change on the other.
The association gradually made up with eight secondary education centres of different European countries, already mentioned, together with the help and counsel of Amnesty International Elche and Pedro Ibarra Chair of University Miguel Hernández of Elche (Spain), directed by Mr Miguel Ors Montenegro.
The present work is thus a product and a result of the Erasmus+ project number 2014-1-ES01-KA201-004981, carried out from the school year 2014/2015 to the school year 2016/2017, with a total budget for the association of 240.130 euros.
Stages of the project
The project has been developed in different stages. First, we have worked on the didactic units from the technical approach of both teachers and experts of several fields; second, we have worked with the students and their families to put these units into practise, checking and measuring their impact in terms of meaningful learning.
We had the first two meetings in Elche (Spain) and Casale Monferrato (Italia), where we laid the foundations of the whole project.
- The first meeting with students took place in Poland, where each country presented their first lesson plan about resistance. It was held from 4 to 8 May, 2015. 16 teachers and 19 foreign students took part in the meeting, along with those of the Polish centre. Students themselves presented several projects about the attitude of resistance before injustice. Two of the most touching moments were visiting Auschwitz or meeting a survivor.
- From 14 to 18 September 2015, we attended a training event for teachers about new technologies and new perspectives for the elaboration of didactic material. We had the opportunity to analyse and discuss about the material we were elaborating, as well as other material already created, and why we had to do something different. 32 teachers attended these conferences celebrated both in the Teaching Foundation of Auschwitz and the Galicia Jewish Museum. This training event helped us to set and redefine our work with the aim of making our lesson plans go beyond the emotional level and become a serious attempt to cover the issue from a practical perspective. Among other issues, we decided that each school would put into practice the lesson plan of another school so that we could discuss the lesson plans real implementation, their results as well as the possible changes.
- From 16 to 19 November 2015, 29 students and 15 teachers met in Vilnia, Lithuania, where we presented our drafts for the second lesson plan, dealing with collaboration. We saw how, meeting after meeting, our motivation increased, as well as the quality of our work and our awareness of working on something which was worth the effort.
- From 29 February to 4 March 2016 we met in Thessaloniki. 33 teachers and 74 students took part in this meeting. The students made their oral presentations, including theatrical performances, related to several aspects of the projects. And the teachers presented our considerations about the implementation of the lesson plans. We realised that the project had gone beyond the final products we had set at the beginning and had given rise to a number of activities that deserved to be shared on a webpage.
- From 18 to 22 April 2016, only teachers met in Slovakia, where we attended a symposium about ethics and education and we presented the final version of the lesson plan of collaboration.
- From 12 to 16 September 2016, we met in Siilinjärvi, Finland. There, we presented the third lesson plan, dealing with indifference, and we laid the foundations for the last lesson plan, the one about the current attitude and the language used by far-right political parties in Europe.
This handbook and the USB pen-drive have the result of all this process, although the most important thing in the process is not only the amount of materials and resources we have elaborated and which go beyond the lesson plans, but also the conclusions that we have reached thanks to the work carried out together with the students and their families.