Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2026 Newsletter
Empowering Female Education Through Semiotic Art and Global Collaboration by Assiye Şahin Akbulut
During the 2025 – 2026 academic year, the project-based learning approach was effectively integrated into classroom environments. In this context, the international eTwinning project " Girls ' Shine 2: Rose and Candle ", implemented in partnership between Türkiye and Moldova, united 26 teachers and 274 students aged 15 – 17 across 9 countries. Inspired by the educational ideals of the project idol Anila Bukhari and the philosophical depth of Mevlana, this project focused heavily on gender equality( SDG 5) and especially the empowerment of girls.
As the founding school, since the majority of our school consists of female students, all of our participants in the project were female students; however, male students from partner schools also participated in the project to ensure a gender-inclusive cooperation. Thus, our female and male students showed active participation in the project at a global level. These structured, student-centred efforts transformed our project into a highly powerful international community of practice on the ESEP platform and in our environment.
Fostering curricular integration through semiotics and artificial intelligence One of the most important focal points of the project was that it offered a multidisciplinary high school curriculum integration connecting Philosophy, Sociology, Logic, Literature, Visual Arts, Chemistry, and Physics courses. Students conducted deep semiotic analyses, utilizing the symbols of the rose and the candle to explore cultural themes. Under teacher guidance, students actively blended advanced digital tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Canva AI to research successful pioneering women, create visual word clouds, and design collaborative storybooks. In addition, an acrostic poem was written for Mevlana ' s aphorism. Birthday cards and birthday music via Suno AI were created for Anila Bukhari. By video-recording the poems read by the students in the secure
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