CONTEXTEurope is portrayed by a set of challenges - unemployment, poverty and social exclusion, terrorism, the mass influx of refugees and ecological construction - that has face to move forward. For such reasons, over the last years, the EU has paid increased attention to a new and progressive vision of combating inequalities that stems from sustainable development. In 2015, all EU member states and other countries in the United Nations have adopted the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, while in 2018, the first Report for Sustainable Equality (2019-2024) was published. In successfully dealing with these crises, Europe needs to endorse a different approach to European Governance that draws upon sustainable development and equality. Ultimate victory is the proof that Europe may empower critical voting among youth that will allow for better decision-making across the EU.PROJECT OBJECTIVESThe first objective of this project is to empower youth to act as agents of change for building a Europe of sustainable development and equality by enhancing their critical-voting literacy that includes: (a) media and news literacy; (b) socio-emotional literacy, and (c) social-justice literacy. To do so, this project draws upon the strategies of critical literacy and experiential learning, by using new technologies, and innovative methodologies, such as collaborative role play and simulations, problem-based learning, critical-incidents analysis, and virtual communities of learning and practice. Another important objective of this project is to promote youth’s and teachers' training to enhance their competences in using such methodologies so as to meet the first objective.PARTICIPANTSFour schools, 2 pedagogical departments of 2 Universities, a confederation of education and training centers, and an association focused on developing new strategies for quality management in education, youth and society across 4 participating countries: Cyprus, Spain, Greece and Italy.METHODOLOGYAn iterative methodology under which 2 versions of the Resources and Activities Toolkti will be produced. After the completion of the 1st version, ‘Resources and activities toolkit’ will be validated in workshops with youth and teachers and based on the conclusions the next version will be planned. All other results will be planned according to the validation process.ACTIVITIES AND RESULTSThis project will produce a methodological tool for enhancing education for critical-voting literacy, including: media and news literacy; socio-emotional literacy; and social-justice literacy. The tool will be developed according to a comparative analysis of both teachers' and youth’s needs analyses in the participating countries, but also on the basis of the state-of-the art analysis in each participating country. According to this methodological tool, the consortium will produce a Toolkit of ‘Resources and Activities’ aiming to empower youth in critical-voting literacy. This Toolkit will be tested through workshops carried out with teachers and youth aged 14-18 and then localised and translated in national languages. As the project also envisages the development of teachers' and youth’s competences to work accordingly, a Teacher's Handbook and a Youth’s Handbook will be produced in the English language, and then localised and translated in national languages. A Group of Experts will contribute by sharing their ideas, expertise, and evaluative feedback to the development of all project outputs. A transnational joint-staff training event will be carried out in Greece to train teachers to use the project outcomes. All the project's products will be promoted through international and national multiplier events that will have the form of conferences organised by the consortium. The project's results will also be disseminated through other venues such as websites, social media, EU platforms, newsletter, publications, etc.TARGET GROUPSThe target groups in the life of the project comprise of youth aged 14-18 and teachers working with youth of that age. Apart from these direct target groups, the beneficiaries include also indirect target groups such as schools, youth’s associations and organisations, NGOs working in the area of voting education, policy makers and educational stakeholders making decisions about school curricula, parents, curriculum developers, teachers training institutions, universities with pedagogical departments. BENEFITPromote sustainable development and equality in Europe by reinforcing the development and implementation of successful initiatives in critical-voting education. The project will help in counteracting the detrimental consequences of populism to the values that define us as Europeans, and mainly sustainable equality, respect for human rights and freedoms, tolerance, pluralism and non-discrimination. Raise youth’s voices and active involvement in decision-making through innovative methodologies.

Language families are relatedThe title of our project sounds like a platitude. It was chosen to illustrate that our project is about the mediation of language skills and giving an insight into our linguistic roots. Five exchange partners from Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain will deal with common features of their linguistic families. To become aware of their own language, students will identify the origin of central European words and learn about their original and their derived meanings.The aims of the project are: strengthening of language skills and intercultural skills and therefore creating empathy for the European idea. By dealing with different foreign-language texts and communicating among each other, students will in particular practice easy linguistic methods and learn about the European origin of central words.The project will be divided into five structured sub-projects. Exchange partners from Spain and Italy will deal with the Romanic linguistic family and in particular with words derived from Latin language by means of religious or political texts, songs, inscriptions and legislative texts. Since a few exchange partners from the Romanic linguistic family will take part on the project, there will be an insight into Latin language. Furthermore, the local university will support the students by finding ways to analyse manipulative aspects in political language.The Slavic linguistic family is the focus of our exchange in Poland. As our partner city Bialystock is the birthplace to the inventor of the artificial language Esperanto, we will have intense workshops in the local Esperanto-museum. Especially the analysis of this easy and clearly structured artificial language shall give the students basic insights into the structure, grammar and basic vocabulary of European languages. Germany represents the Germanic linguistic family. In Neuss students will deal with central and international German words, and they will also work on the English linguistic word field since we have no English-speaking exchange partners. English words will be identified in for example songtexts, advertising language, the IT field or in malls. Each project will take place over four days and they all shall be structured in the same way. We begin with a „meet and greet“ and move on with an opening ceremony. Workshops will mainly take place at school but also in churches, museums and malls. All students will be welcomed by employees of each town hall and sightseeing trips are planned. On the last day of each project students will present and evaulate their results that should be documented in a creative way e.g. on posters.

It is common practice for teachers to work alone with their students, without engaging in many collaborative practices with their colleagues. While the necessity to prepare young people for full participation in a rapidly changing society has been noted by educational policy makers at an international level, leading to increased emphasis on the development of students’ key skills and competences, this is not often reflected in teacher professional development and the corresponding development of their own key skills.There is a significant body of research that points to the need for methods of teaching and learning that are innovative, competence-based and student-centred, but despite moves to change the curricular focus, a traditional model of schooling is still prevalent. Teachers are the agents of change in the reform process but can also be inflexible and can resist change unless they understand and agree with the reasoning behind a reform, its implications for their classroom practice, and consequences for their students.An objective of this project is to support and enhance the development of collaborative and reflective environments (CaRE) in schools. We will mirror the development of key skills and competences that are generally advocated for students, within the whole-school environment by encouraging teachers to work increasingly collaboratively, and by providing structures in which sharing, communicating and critically reflecting on practice become the norm. Through collaboration with our partners across Europe, we aim to establish a set of guidelines to support teachers to come together to communicate and share good practice and creative approaches, and to critically evaluate and reflect. In order to facilitate this, one of the project objectives is to develop resources for reflection at whole-school level. Our aim is to develop tools and procedures that assist in the identification of common goals as well as resources for planning and assessing progress towards them.A related objective is to develop a commonly agreed upon set of descriptions of the key skills (Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking, Creativity and Self-Direction) and of activities or actions that may be indicative of their development. This should support teachers’ capacity to integrate the development of key skills into their classrooms, and to effectively monitor and assess their students in this regard.A total of 42 participants will take part in this project, made up of 6 teachers from each of the 7 partner schools. Thanks to the transnational nature of the project, and the choice of partners within geographic clusters as well as individual schools, we have been able to establish a project structure that reflects three levels of CaRE: within schools, between schools, and online.The project involves 6 LTTs; 2 in Ireland and 1 in each of the other partner countries. Throughout the project, the partners will develop processes and resources to support CaREs in their school, within their cluster, and at project level. The theory that will be used to underpin the activities is drawn from research into Communities of Practice, with particular emphasis on the “TeachMeet” approach.An overarching Theory of Change (ToC) methodology will be employed. This is an innovative and holistic method that can be used to assess the progress of the project in terms of meeting its overarching goals, individual activity aims, and to guide the project participants in evaluating their own progress. Within the ToC framework, qualitative and quantitative indicators will be employed to monitor the progress, quality and achievements of the project and its activities.By working with schools in a variety of countries and contexts, we hope to develop a robust but flexible set of guidelines and resources. It is expected that this project will have a positive impact at local, regional, national, European and potentially international levels. In fact, the structure of the project will support such impact at each of these levels through the development of CaRE in Schools, CaRE Clusters and CaRE online, with each level growing from and building on the previous. Through the LTTs and development of outputs, our intention is to abstract the fundamental structures and supports required in order to successfully develop CaREs at each of these levels, in order to create resources that can be used to inform other institutions’ development in this way. In addition, the modules and resources developed through the project will support these burgeoning CaRE communities at European/international levels. Longer-term, we also see potential for the project to have an impact at national levels on teacher initial education and professional development programmes. Our hope is to demonstrate, through rigorous research, the benefit of developing and supporting CaREs in schools, promoting communities of practice and developing critical and reflective practitioners.

One of our vital educational objectives is not only to convey expertise to our pupils, but also to educate them to be critical and reflective citizens in our democratic society.In our project we therefore put emphasis on contents that are close to their individual living conditions on the one hand and that are of global importance on the other hand.The conceptual framework is set by the critical evaluation of national stereotypes and prejudices. The pupils will work on surveys on their views and opinions about the participating countries before and after the project. They will answer questions like: What is our view upon our partner countries and their inhabitants? How do the others look upon us? Do the views change after personal contacts have been established? Our aim is to strengthen values such as respect and tolerance sustainably beyond national borders and thus to encourage the European idea as well as to foster our pupils' respectful behaviour towards each other in daily life.The 1st meeting in Spain will focus on living conditions and sports activities. On the one hand the pupils who are from very different geographical and social areas will have a critical look at the advantages and disadvantages of living in the countryside or in the city, whereas on the other hand the sports activities shall enable them to find out about the importance of physical activities for a well-balanced and healthy living.The 2nd meeting in Germany will deal with a healthy diet and eating habits. Pupils will compare their eating habits which may lead to changes in their food habits, for example, when they buy food at the school kiosk or when they eat in the school canteen. By preparing a healthy meal for all participants – a buffet of healthy European food – the pupils shall be enabled to question their own eating habits and to broaden their knowledge about healthy food in general.During the 3rd meeting in Sweden our pupils will work on the topic of recycling to make them aware of the endangered environment. Pupils will work intensely in workshops on important questions of environment protection: What can we do to protect the environment and to avoid waste at the same time? What can we do to preserve our planet for the future generations?The 4th meeting in France will deal with social media. Pupils should become aware of the significance the use of social media has got in their lives. Furthermore they shall find out about both the advantages and the dangers of social media such as cyberbullying for example. All the efforts shall enable the pupils to use social media carefully and reasonably.Not only the contents but also the various methods used in our project should lead to an important increase in competence and expertise of both pupils and teachers. Eight students and two to three teachers from each country will take part in every meeting. The pupils will stay in host families to give them insight into the daily life of their exchange partners. Thus the pupils will get the chance to improve their knowledge of the foreign language English as well as to get an insight into other cultures.During all activities the exchange partners will have plenty of opportunities to enhance their knowledge of methods by cooperative learning, in project-oriented workshops or by using modern media.Furthermore the pupils' competence in methods will be increased by all the activities that take place before and after the meetings, for example by the work on the surveys, the use of eTwinning, by searching material or by documenting their experiences.The work on our project will enable our pupils to acquire important key skills that can have a positive impact on their personal development and on their school and job-related career and thus help them to live successfully in our modern world.This is important since the pupils of two of the four participating schools live in socially disadvantaged quarters. Everyday life of a lot of these pupils is affected by discrimination and failure or disappointment at school so that they need special assistance to enable them to live a successful life both at school and in society. The intended findings and conclusions of our project will qualify and sustain our pupils in this process.

CONTEXT Over the last year, the EU has paid increased attention in launching dialogue with children. It is noteworthy that last November, the European Parliament marked World Children’s Day by fostering a debate with children and young people about the ‘Europe we want’. At the same time, Europe faces a severe refugee and migration crisis that has created a multiculturalism that is qualitatively different than the multiculturalism resulting from the presence of minorities or past-generation migrants across Europe. In successfully dealing with this crisis, ultimate victory is the proof that Europe can successfully include migrants, and particularly migrant children who make up a third of EU asylum seekers. What the 2018 European Year of Cultural Heritage suggests is that to promote inclusion we may celebrate and cherish the diversity of our cultural heritage. PPROJECT OBJECTIVES The first objective of this project is to empower children to act as agents of change for building a child-friendly Europe in the sense that is socially-inclusive by celebrating and cherishing the diversity of our cultural heritage. To do so, it encompasses the children-inspiring-children approach, while using new technologies, and innovative and creative methodologies, such as collaborative art-making, intercultural online pedagogy, and collaborative story-telling and poetry. Another important objective of this project is to promote children’s and teachers' training to enhance their competences in becoming the facilitators of the children-inspiring-children approach so as to meet the first objective of the project. PARTICIPANTS Four schools, 2 pedagogical departments of 2 Universities, a confederation of education and training centers, and an NGO with a network to improve the reading competence of children and young people across 4 participating countries: Cyprus, Spain, Greece and Austria. METHODOLOGY An iterative methodology under which two versions of the Resources and Activities will be produced. After the completion of the first version, resources and activities will be validated in workshops with children and teachers and based on the conclusions the next version will be planned. All other results will be planned according to the validation process. ACTIVITIES AND RESULTS The EUROCHANGE project will produce a methodological tool for the Children-inspiring-children approach according to a comparative analysis that will result from both teachers' and children's needs analyses in the participating countries, but also on the basis of the state-of-the art analysis in each participating country. According to this methodological tool, the consortium will produce a Toolkit of Resources and Activities that will promote the objective of the project; that is children to become agents of change in creating a child-friendly socially-inclusive Europe by cherishing the diversity of our cultural heritage. This Toolkit will be tested through workshops carried out with teachers and children 9-12 and then finalised, localised and translated in the national languages. As the project also envisages the development of teachers' and children's competences to work accordingly, a Teacher's Handbook and a Children's Handbook will be also produced in the English language, and then localised and translated in the consortium languages. It is notable that a Group of Experts that will be created for the purposes of this project will contribute to the whole of both developing the methodological tool and the Toolkit of Resources and Activities, but also the Teachers' and the Children's Handbooks process by sharing their ideas and expertise, but also their evaluative feedback. A short transnational joint-staff training event will be carried out in Greece in order to provide the opportunity to teachers to be trained to use the project outcomes. All the project's products will be promoted through international and national multiplier events that will have the form of conferences organised by the consortium. The project's results will also be disseminated through other venues such as websites, social media, EU platforms, newsletter, publications, etc. TARGET GROUPS The target groups in the life of the project comprise of children aged 9-12 and teachers) working with children of that age. Apart from these direct target groups, the beneficiaries include also indirect target groups such as schools, children's associations and organisations, policy makers and educational stakeholders making decisions about school curricula, parents, children's curriculum developers, teachers training institutions, universities with pedagogical departments etc. BENEFIT Promote social inclusion in a multicultural Europe by taking advantage of the potential that cultural heritage gives us celebrate and cherish our diversity. Raise children’s voices and active involvement in education through an innovative methodology drawing upon the children-inspiring-children approach.