Unter diesem Link könnt ihr Europa kennenlernen, viel Spaß!!

So könnte jeder Morgen starten ;-)

Eigentlich nicht schwer, und doch etwas Besonderes für den Alltag der 6. Klasse! Gemeinsam mit Frau Wirsing organisierte die Klasse ein Frühstück, wie wir es in der Türkei genossen hatten, Tee aus kleinen Gläsern, Simit vom türkischen Bäcker am Kottbusser Tor - die den türkischen Originalen wirklich geschmacklich in nichts nachstehen - und dazu leckere Marmelade, Honig und Butter, mmmh!

Movements in dancing offer many possibilities of meeting. They can be a bridge to getting to know each other, they can be a way of communicating  and of getting over language fences and limits. Movements in dancing are a way of meeting, of making contact, of getting closer to your partner or partners and of explaining yourself and understanding the others. You can start by imitating, of following the movements of the others with your eyes and to do alike or to influence them to do like you. This can motivate everyone to communicate verbally because you might want to ask or to explain something with words. It is a way of developing a common language.

The actual work will not only be done by pupils and teachers but also by project partners from outside school that will show different ways of teaching and learning, will enlarge our method competences. Also watching the children in the project work opens a new view for teachers on more ways of learning. In this process they will also attend to meetings on pedagogical themes.

In the former project of some of us 'european-classroom' we have experienced that communication between pupils of different maternal languages can be initiated by doing. During our meeting it was the dancing and playing together that showed us how easiliy, intensely and effectively children were able to act together and finally communicate. By themselves they started   looking for words. Independently of the teachers' impulse the motive for communicating has built up.

Apart from that 'dancing' opens access to various themes:

 

• traditional / ethnic dancing styles
• origins and history of dancing
• professional dancing
• biographies of famous dancers
• dancing and gender stereotypes
• dancing and health
• dancing as nonverbal communication / expressional dancing
• transfer of dancing styles by the media (mtv, viva etc.)
•  ...

 

 

By working on everyone of these aspects children as well as teachers contribute what everyone of them has in their own cultural 'rucksack'. Everyone will find what they have in common and what is different not only in the work with the European partners,  but also with the children of their own surrounding. In this process they find and state some new aspects of their own identity and learn to value aspects  of identification they haven't met before.

'New' teaching like project teaching, interdisciplinary teaching, self- directed learning  can be actually praticed and can find a way into school developement programs.

The complexity of the themes makes it possible to work on it in various subjects like music, English, arts, history, geography or p.e.

This learning by moving  will be done in cooperation with as many out of school partners as possible (parents, music schools, sport clubs, comprehensive colleges etc.) The partner schools will communicate by video conferences, by dvd, mails and photos as well as by visiting each other. The results of the project work will be presented on homepages, in exhibitions, and a big  'Festival of European dancing', which will be the final highlight.

The working process with the children:

 

• strengthening of their personal identity
• critical and respectful learning of foreign tradtions and values
• dealing with gender stereotypes
• enlarging the knowledge of language in a working process

The working process with the teachers (partners / supporters):

 

• realizing of interdiciplinary project work and implementing it into European school programs
• exchange and development / improving of 'inclusion'
• exchange of the various ideas and experiences with 'individual learning'
• exchange of carious ideas and experiences with the Anti - Bias . program

The working process itself:

 

• visiting each other
• documentation of the working results
• creating an own common website
• conferences with professionals on the various aspects of the project 
• festival of European dancing.

Statistics on the quality of school education  have become a standard throughout Europe and schools have to live up to them. Interesting concepts for education of children with a migration background, of children with special needs or of children of schools in very problematic areas can be found and compared throughout Europe.

In this process individual learning and inclusion are important items. They make individualized curricula for everyone a demand and a challenge for school authorities and the teaching staff.

We want to have a look at the concepts of inclusion, individual learning and the establishment of basic democratic principles we find in our partner countries, discuss their qualities as well as their possibilities and the obstacles in realizing them in our own pedagogic work.

To do that it seems important to integrate all the concerned pedagogic 'forces' (schoolstaffs, universities and other pedagogic training facilities, organisations, sport clubs etc). Planning of integrated conferences seems to be a vital element of the project.

The impact we expect by the activities on pupils, learners, trainers, staff and on the participating institutions:

 

• pupils:
  •  an experience of how easy it is to get contact with people and ways of life that were so far unknown to them
  • a motive to learn English as the common language (and other languages), the tool of communication for eight European
• partner countries:
  •  to get aware of one's own roots and to experience how much they gain by getting to know the others'
  •  to understand about gender stereotypes and the possibilities of variating them
• trainers / staff / supporters:
  • to learn by the acting of the children how easy it can be to get contact
  • to exchange ideas about individual learning, integration and inclusion
  • to widen ideas about integration, inclusion and working with heterogenous classes
  • to take part in the developement of curricula (at each school in a Europe context)
  • to get stronger for projects that open schools for networking
  • ...

The relevance of the project in our context  (national and regional) and in the context of the programe objectives will be:

 

• developement of the school profile to a 'school for all pupils'
• widening the knowledge about European countries (languages, geography, history and cultural identity of all the project partner countries)
•  strenghtening of the personal identities of the children by learning more about their own country's cultural identity
• seeing and valuing other cultural identities
• analysing of traditional gender stereotypes
• integration of out of school partners like universities and other teacher training institutes as well as the parents
•  supporting further training of the school staff
• setting up network structures
• ...

Every single one of the partner schools is to organize working groups on the subject 'dancing and acting'. These working groups are integrated into everyday school life, they are part of the teaching program. The teachers of the project develop a plan in cooperation with their out of school partners. Aspects like 'history of dancing', 'dancing and gender', ' dancing and health', 'dancing and communication' or 'the story of famous dancers' can be part of the plan. We developed a planning cluster that can be used in the planning prozess.

Each school has the responsibility to make sure that as many students as possible take part in the project work. The final planning and an exchange of teaching ideas can take part on the first meeting in September 2011. The meeting will als0 check possibilities decide about the experts that are going to be invited to the expert conferences on the following topics:

 

• schools with inclusion throughout the EU
•  individual learning / tutoring and working with competence catalogues vs standards
• gender stereotypes and school education
• learning democracy and bias aware education
• intercultural education in the curricula of EU countries  

First ideas on the expert conferences have been exchanged already. It is important that these conferences can be done in the project language English.

In the course of the project there will be two kinds of meetings: meetings with dancing festivals and meetings with expert conferences. The first  meeting will dedicated to the work on the project website (introducing the tools, designing the contens). The website 'communication-by-dancing-and- acting' is the central media of presenting the work on the project.

On dancing meetings there will be performances by as many children as possible from the partner countries.

The meetings with expert conferences will make it possible to have an exchange about the themes by including as many teachers as possible from the schools and  representives of out school partners.

All meetings are used for further planning arrangements, solving problems with realisation of ideas and for exchange about the development of the project.