Visibility of eTwinning Projects Group July 2018 Newsletter------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2018, European Year of Cultural Heritage … in eTwinning! by Elena Pezzi and Alicia López Palomera
We all know that 2018 is the European Year of Cultural Heritage.
This is the official introduction to the year:“ The aim of the European Year of Cultural Heritage is to encourage more people to discover and engage with Europe ' s cultural heritage, and to reinforce a sense of belonging to a common European space. The slogan for the year is: Our heritage: where the past meets the future.”( https:// europa. eu / culturalheritage / about)
eTwinning, which makes the sense of belonging to the common European area one of its strengths, could not remain away of this important event.
Once again the official words help us to trace our path within our being active eTwinners:“ Cultural heritage shapes our identities and everyday lives. It surrounds us in Europe ' s towns and cities, natural landscapes and archaeological sites. It is not only found in literature, art and objects, but also in the crafts we learn from our ancestors, the stories we tell to our children, the food we enjoy in company and the films we watch and recognise ourselves in.”( https:// europa. eu / cultural-heritage / about)
Is this not a description of what we already do with our students, our classes, our colleagues, our pupils’ families?
Thinking about cultural identity and heritage should always be the basis of our daily teaching, but this specific year has certainly helped us to implement projects with particular focus on this topic. Through eTwinning projects, cultural heritage is no longer an abstract concept but becomes concrete, living reality transmitted by the partner, object of research and source of continuous discoveries.
This has been the case for our project,“ De ismo a ismo … y nunca serás el mismo”( https:// twinspace. etwinning. net / 44605), in which we have investigated how an artistic and literary phenomenon is actually the bearer of values that are still extremely topical. This project( whose language of communication is Spanish) wanted to show the main ideas of the avant-garde period in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, its new art and the multitude of its“ isms” and creations and their influence on literary trends.
We have tried to reflect on the concept of " cultural heritage " as a complex of tangible( artistic and
literary productions) and intangible elements( attitudes, mentalities, ways of life) that have allowed the development of a European citizenship that was created during the twentieth century and that continues to deeply influence our current culture. It is enough to think in fact of all those artistic and cultural manifestations of breaking limits and conventions that still today we find in our societies.
How have we been working? The activities have been grouped into two main sections: creative workshops on the spirit and art of the avant-garde and reflective workshops on the“ isms”, combining some active methodologies.
A fundamental point in the scheduling of the activities has been to strongly involve the students in the process of designing and creating the project’ s pathway. We had groups of pupils with different levels of age, competence, learning and / or difficulties, but they all got passionate about the project and actively worked on it. One of the strong points was the modular structure and the different proposals for activities, which allowed all pupils to work according to their own rhythms and skills, but always with a view to collaboration for the joint implementation of the activities.
An innovative aspect is that we have structured the project by including an unconventional itinerary of art and literature in classes not used to this type of proposals, thus allowing students to expand their knowledge regarding the European cultural heritage.
Equally unusual is the fact that the work, normally carried out in international groups of 4-5 students, saw aggregations and re-aggregations of groups, which were not composed of the same students every month: this certainly has required a plus of flexibility and ability to adapt to different ways of collaboration. This method, however, has led to great creativity in the creation of collaborative work by teams, who have never succumbed to the temptation of routine and repetitiveness of procedures already adopted and known.
This has also ensured that integration into the curriculum( which is an essential element for us) has been fluid and effective in all aspects: linguistic, communicative and- above all- artistic, literary and cultural. We have always applied PBL methodology and task-based approach in order to enable pupils to develop skills and at the same time acquire the curriculum content of the subjects involved. For this reason, all partners also adapted
98