Comenius 1-1: School Project

"Freedom and Limits - Conditions and contradictions for young people in Europe"

Hosting School

Tørring Amtsgymnasium - Tørring (Denmark)

Latest news

You can download our new tones for your mobile. / Puedes bajar nuevos tonos o melodías para tu móvil lejos de los archiconocidos. Busca el enlace.

Learn some of the limericks made by clas-mates / Aprende algún "limerick" (poesía breve y jocosa) hecha por compañeros.

Have a look at the statistics compairing the use of the NEW MEDIA in our three countries / Echa una ojeada a las estadísticas comparando el uso de los nuevos medios entre la juventud de nuestros 3 países.

Calendar

Deadlines:

The questionnaire results (Deadline): Results should be passed on to the partners by November 30.

Background studies are done individually in the countries and with the subjects who want to take part (social science, literature, biology, etc.)

The results of the polarity profile must be passed on to partners latest February 28

The three best short stories must be passed on by March 26.

Conference in Palencia: 18-20th of April, 2007

Conference in Hamburg: Autumn 2007

Conference in Sliven: April, 2008

Links:

Report on the Tørring Conference
September 25th -27th 2006

A. STARTING POINT


Five schools applied for this Comenius project. Only Palencia, Tørring and Hamburg were accepted.

The partners in Poland and Bulgaria don't get any support for this school year. While the reasons for the rejection in Poland are not clear (it might be the result of a lot of changes at ZSO II) Maria from Sliven sent us the official information of the Bulgarian National Agency. This letter is a little bit strange because there are some contradictions in it:

"Die Ziele und die Aktivitäten zum Projekt wurden
nicht konkret angeführt und sind kein Hinweis, dass
die Projektidee verwirklicht wird. Die Auswirkung ist
nicht geklärt und deshalb zweifeln wir am Nutzen von
der Verwirklichung des Projekts.
Das Projekt wurde von einem Bewerber vorgestellt, der
keine Erfahrung an der Teilnahme an europäischen
Programmen hat. Damit sind die Lücken beim Ausfüllen
von einigen Stellen im Formular zu erklären. Das Thema
ist gut und aktuell, gerichtet auf die Jugendlichen.
Die Aktivitäten sind realisierbar, man hat gute
Maßnahmen zur Kontrolle und Verbreitung."

Both partners will apply again to take part in the project for the next school year.

Hamburg, Palencia and Tørring. Which students and subjects will take part?

Spain: Students - 1st and 2nd year of bachillerato (15-17 years old). Subjects: Spanish, English, Philosophy, Music, IT, History

Germany: Students - 10th -11th grade (15-17 years old). Subjects: Social science, German, History, (music)

Denmark: Students - 1st and 2nd year (16-18 years old). Subjects: English, Social Science, Mathematics, German, Spanish, Music

Harry will probably leave school next year and thus will not be able to continue as the main coordinator of the project. The participating teachers agreed in the following solution: KTG will be responsible as coordinating school for the whole period and Harry will continue as the main coordinator for this school year.


B. WORK ON THIS YEAR'S SUBJECTS

1. First Theme: New Media and Communication

Teachers and students worked in two separate groups. It turned out that the groups had a totally different approach to this theme.

The students chose a very broad view to it. They presented the following mind map:


In their explanation the students showed that they prefer direct (that means: oral) communication and contact by meeting people.
Students had discussed some of the positive and negative aspects of TV, internet etc. In the end the discussion was narrowed down to dealing with mobile phones.

Aspects of the discussion:
- Most of the young people are depending on their mobile phone. They are "feeling lost" when they can't find it or have forgotten it at home.
- It is a hard punishment when your mobile number is cancelled in the contact function of other mobiles. Then you are not "in" any longer but really "out".
- Among the students it is not noticed as a problem that privacy disappears when people have telephone calls in public rooms like buses etc.
- But it comes close to a crime to read sms that other people received because there must be a protection of privacy.
- Spanish, German and Danish students are never using their mobiles during lessons in school!

Because teachers are teachers ("déformation professionelle") they focussed more on problems:
- Linguistic patterns are changing: it seems that after several centuries in which written language has had the highest authority; we are moving (back?) into a new "oral society".
- People don't care about spelling mistakes in E-mails and sms any longer. This is a challenge for teachers who are used to correcting spelling mistakes.
- A new kind of language has appeared that is based on icons, symbols and special abbreviations ("sms language"); English has a high significance in this connection.
- Some youngsters are bullied by older ones by use of sms.

Together we decided to investigate the student's media habits by a questionnaire. Nanny and Michael worked it out so it was ready the next day (see annex 1). This task could be solved in Social Science lessons or in Literature class.
Other subjects who want to take part may work with their own angle (f. ex. Maths: digital signatures, music: ringtones, arts: graphic signs).
Language subjects will make different creative tasks:
- writing sms-poetry using the new language forms like mentioned above
- writing letters, in particular e-mail, sms, and other new forms
- writing the other half of a (mobile) phone dialogue you are listening to in the bus.

It is important to inform each other about the material we use and the best material from each country should be exchanged.
We discussed different ways of presenting our results, for instance writing newspaper articles, calling for a press conference or similar activities that would disseminate our results also in the local area.
A more internal dissemination could take place via a computer conference. However, the Tørring model with passwords for everybody was considered too complicated so now the partners will look for different other possibilities, for instance internet services like "Messenger".

The results (questionnaire and creative tasks) should be presented in a web-site made in each country, or (word-)documents could be sent to Tørring and placed on our common web-site there.

2. Second theme: Work

This theme is quite vast and could be approached from many different angles. Like the day before we worked in two groups, students and teachers apart, and met in a plenum to settle the work.

Students' discussion

Students had focused a lot on their own situation and saw work as education (school work), thus also a means to obtain freedom (freedom and limits). They had produced the following mind map:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In continuation they made an effort to investigate the associations that would appear when focusing on the word "work", which resulted in the next mind map:

A simple model to involve two keywords from our project could be to say that

Limit = time and Freedom = money

The students found it important to focus on questions like:

How hard it is to get a job (if for instance you are a hippie, an immigrant, or just very young)?
Which attitudes or prejudice do you meet when you are looking for a job?
How can students connect their private life and working life"?

What does work mean for our society?
Do we need unions?
Under which conditions do we want to work?

Students' discussion summed up by the teachers:

The focus should be on work = study and work after school
What does work mean for students?
What are the working conditions for young workers in the different countries?
Students have different conditions: in some places they pay for school and/or books, and in some places they have no time to work after school
It could be interesting to compare which system is the best
- for the students
- for the government
- for society

Moreover we would like to investigate what are the reasons to work for students in the different countries?
- do students have to work at all? (S: very uncommon that students work, school is considered work enough)
- do students work because they are immigrants? (D: a country with many immigrants who often work because they are needed in the families)
- do students work to have money for leisure? (DK: almost every student has a work to be able to buy clothes, cd's, cinema tickets, go out in weekends, etc.).

Teachers' discussion

In the teachers' discussion Juanjo brought about the interesting observation that there is an inborn condemnation of the concept of work in the Catholic approach when compared with Protestant etymology. Apparently the Catholic terms for avoiding/getting away from work are positive, whereas the Protestant terms sound more of struggle, for instance:
   huelga >< strike (could also be translated "leisure")
   jubilado >< pensioner (connotes also "rejoicing")

We found that it would be interesting to investigate if there are traceable differences in the concept of work also among the modern young generation and thus a part of the theme work should be to make a so-called "polarity profile".
This theme appeals mostly to the subjects Social Science and Literature or Language. In Spain they don't have an independent subject called Social Sciences, which means that most of the work will take place in Literature class. Should a Biology teacher be interested in taking part, it would be interesting to study what the changes in working conditions mean for the body (for instance lifestyle illnesses like obesity and cardiac diseases).
We decided to work on the theme in three different steps: Step 1 - a background study of the local labour market conditions in the different countries, step 2 - a polarity profile, step 3 - a short story inspired by the theme.

Step 1

A background study should be carried out (Social Science, History, Biology or any other subject that could be relevant) in which students should inform themselves about important questions concerning:

Identity and lifestyle:
Is work necessary?
What are the motivations for having a job? Money? Reputation? Tradition? ...?
Time - how should the distribution between work and leisure time be?

Economy:
How big is unemployment? Can it be avoided?
Mobility - are people ready to move to another place to get a job? Or to spend many hours on the road to reach their jobs?
How do job centres work? How much help can you get there to find a job?
Centre-periphery - where do you find which kind of jobs? Is unemployment connected to certain areas?

Future:
Which job would you like to have?
What do you want to achieve?
How will you find a job?
Which working conditions (holidays, maternity leave, etc.) are important for you and why?
How long working hours would you like?
Which salary do you go for?

Step 2

The polarity profile should investigate the semantic aspect or rather connotations on different words connected with work.
After some discussion about which terms are neutral enough to be used in different languages we ended up with the following list of terms we want to test:
Work
Unemployment
Strike
Unions
Part-time work
Apprenticeship
Further education
Globalization
Housewife

We also agreed on a set of contrasting adjectives to test the words. Annex 2 is a master, which must be translated into the local languages and the above mentioned test words must be translated and exchanged at the top of the table.

Step 3

The third step is writing a short story inspired in the theme. We set the following rules:

It must be a vision for the future (could be a science-fiction story but not necessarily).
It should deal with working conditions for the students themselves or somebody else.
It should include information that has been collected during the theme-work.
It should not exceed three pages and could well be shorter.
Each country selects the three best ones, which must be passed on to the partners in English and in the native language (German, Spanish and Danish respectively).

3.- CULTURAL PROGRAMME

The Danish hosts created a nice programme that included five different dimensions for a better understanding of Danish life and culture:

1. The school

Every visitor at the TAG - especially teachers from other countries - is really getting envious about the facilities and the atmosphere in this school. Michael expressed his impressions in his way: "I will not start an envy discussion because here they are playing in a different league." He is right.
Even there are still some building activities for a new wing you got already the impression how many new opportunities this school will have for more Comenius (and daily) work.

2. The countryside
Of course it was a must to go to Jelling to have a look at two runic stones which are called "Denmark's birth certificate" as a Christian country. The kings Gorm the Old and Harold Bluetooth lived here and the signs on the stones are praising how powerful they have been.

Also impressing was the so-called "Ravningebro" - an old wooden Viking bridge that was built to transport armies through a swampy area. It is still well known for all Europeans that the Vikings have been very efficient in burning down their cities and stealing their women. But it is a real nice challenge for every visitor who is confronted with the rotten leftovers at this place to imagine good old Viking power.

3. The town

"Økolariet" - that's the name of an extraordinary building and exhibition in Vejle (20 kms away from Tørring). In this educational centre on environment (for everybody - not only for school classes) all of your senses are challenged to get a deeper understanding of using resources, producing garbage and the possibilities for recycling (the municipality of Vejle recycles as much as 80 % of all kinds of so-called shit - that's the highest amount in whole little Denmark).
One of the highlights in this centre is a "realistic" trip with a robot through the sewers in the Vejle underground, including sounds, moves and meeting rats. Only the original smell was missed.

4. The big, big city

After Tørring, Jelling and Vejle the visit to the big, big city of Århus (the second city in Denmark - 300,000 inhabitants) came close to a cultural shock. "Aros", a big new museum for arts, disappointed one of the male visitors because he expected more paintings with big naked women. All the other ones enjoyed it.
The shopping action was also interesting for most of us, especially because in this big, big city all the shops were closing already at 6 p.m. So we had to grab the only chance left to take part in Danish lifestyle by having a nice beer outdoors at the riverside. After the last sip of beer darkness fell over Denmark and the country was closed until the next morning.

5. The food
Apart from restaurant Sct. Andreas in Vejle, where we had dinner all students and teachers together, dinners took place in private homes. We were invited both to Birgit and headmaster Ole, where we had wonderful food, some of it traditional Danish food and some of it more mixed international food like what most Danes eat nowadays.
All in all we spent three interesting and inspiring days together and got the power to carry on with this project.

October 22,
Inger and Harry