Students number
1000
Teachers number
100
City Country
Web
Palermo - Italy
http://liceodecosmi.gov.it/
We are in Palermo, on the north coast of Sicily, in South Italy. Our school: “G.A. De Cosmi” is located in a suburban
area of the town and it is an old school, founded in 1860. It is a High School with two different curricula: Human
Sciences and Linguistic. In our school there are about 1.000 students, aged from 14 to 19, gathered in 45 classes and
100 teachers. 5% of our students are special needs’ students and present disabilities at different levels (from mental
retardation to Down Syndrome or dyslexia). Students who attend our school are really motivated and talented:
most of them pass their final exam with good marks and very few of them fail. Our students participated to different
contests both regional and national and they obtained good results. The contest they had taken part are drama and
cultural contests. Students are involved in acting classical Greek comedies and take part to a regional theatre
competition with a lot of other schools coming from all over Sicily. In drama performances our students learn how to
revise a dramatic text, act a role, personalise themes, work in team, build up a scenery, communicate with the
audience, associate words and music, how to be themselves, expressing their feelings and their thoughts freely.
Every year our school promotes projects to support our students’ talent in order to motivate and encourage them to
train and study. These projects offer different opportunities to our students, to make them aware of our European
citizenship and increase their feeling of our European belonging, through a strengthening of the interest on foreign
languages and European culture. Therefore every year our school has been organising courses to let the students get
the certification in foreign languages according to the CEFR (English, French, German and Spanish, as well as
experiences abroad such as weekly study programmes (in Brighton or Canterbury, Salamanca and Antibes) and
twinning projects. Since 2010 we have been cooperating with a German School near Cologne and every year about
60 Italian and German students take part to this project. For two years our students have started a job experience
linked to the subjects present in the school syllabus. Human Sciences students spent one week in different local
communities for people in need (parentless children, retiring houses, etc.); linguistic school students spent one week
in touristic sites. Our students showed a lively interest in such experiences because they felt involved in a job activity
real and related to their studies.