Summary

“Dilemmas” project is focused on the field of civic and ethical education, though one of its main objectives is, at the same time, to improve the global linguistic competence of the students and promote the use of English as a vehicle for communication among citizens of the European Union.

The Partnership has been designed as a strategy to share and discuss values, attitudes and behavior among High School students, mainly girls and boys from 15 to 18, from different European countries through the elaboration and resolution of practical dilemmas related to a wide range of horizontal issues regarding the main challenges we all face in the social construction of our lives.

Topics

1. Comparing values and behaviour based on scientific questions: Nutrition, Genetics and Environmental Protection

2. Environmental concerns: sustainable development

3.  Different forms of discrimination and conflict (I): gender inequality and violence

4. Different forms of discrimination and conflict (II): Social minorities

The students in each school will try to find out which problems in their everyday life (school and family life, friendship and love, leisure…) are relevant for these overall topics and then elaborate them as dilemmas, propose solutions, identify the values involved in the decision-taking process and compare those of their own with alternative answers.

Objectives

a) To improve oral and written competence both in the mother language and English and to acquire confidence in the use of English as a useful tool to communicate and work together with people in all European countries.

b) To increase young people's awareness of belonging to the European space of citizenship based on understanding and respect for human rights and democracy, encouraging tolerance and respect for other peoples and cultures.

c) To promote intercultural education and to strengthen its contribution to social integration, active citizenship, intercultural dialogue, gender equality and personal fulfillment.

d) To motivate reflective and critical thought as a way of avoiding prejudices

e) To increase students’ motivation, make learning more attractive (particularly for those at a socio-economic disadvantage) and to reduce early school leaving

f) To improve the use of new information and communication technologies

Key Competences

a) Communication in foreign / mother language:

The first of these concerns rises from the need of improving our students’ English competence and, at the same time, those related with their mother tongue.

Developing overall linguistic competence, and specially the learning of English as first foreign language, is for us a motivation worthy in itself;  but we think that it is very important to stress the fact that these competences are, in general, tools for communicating thoughts and feelings and that, in the particular case of English, very useful tools to ensure this communication among citizens with a great diversity of mother languages, as This is not only typical in our European common space, but also in the Global world which we must be aware we live in.

In short: we think that our students are going to discover that the mere possibility of teamwork in such a multicultural context requires the mastering of a shared lingua franca and that English is today the main vehicle for that.

b) Social and civic competences:

The proposed topics, the contents, are not considered to be just a pretext for the goal of improving linguistic competence.

In fact, “Dilemmas” is a project born from two different main concerns, the second one giving contents to the first,  similar  to the interaction of Foreign Language and specific topics in CLIL approaches.  We think that education in values and  an active citizenship are nowadays some of the main challenges that we face in our schools and that working with these issues in a European context, sharing and discussing values, beliefs and behaviour among students and teachers (as expressed in our project’s title) from four different countries will be an effective and highly motivating way of improving social and civic competences, specially in two main fields: those of environmental concerns and those related with discrimination and conflict.

c) Digital competences:

“Dilemmas”Project development strongly relies upon the use of advanced and interactive ICT tools (web 2.0 - weblog, web page editor, movie maker/ editor, and so on)  which will be used both within classes and in the communication with partners.

d) Cultural awareness and expression:

One of our main goals is that of contrasting individual values and beliefs in a context wider than our familiar ground. Focusing on such a context, which will involve students and teachers from four regions with quite different historical and cultural backgrounds (Denmark, Germany, Romania and Spain) is important in order to encourage the participants to learn more about different European countries, and also to discover what they can possibly share and, last but not least, to increase respect and tolerance for differences. Differences that, by the way, can also be discovered inside each individual community: we do not expect to prove that students and teachers in each country think and behave, as a whole, in a particular way, but rather to show that the diversity of points of view crosses in several ways our common space.

e) Learning to learn:

The strategy that we have chosen to develop the project focuses on the elaboration and resolution of practical dilemmas in both the mother languages and English. This strategy is designed in order to cover a wide range of horizontal issues. Besides the relevance of the topics dealt with, it offers an effective way to find out prejudices, clichés and stereotypes often unconsciously (and therefore uncritically) involved in our expressed opinions, decisions or behaviour. To provide an opportunity for a critical reflection over them seems to be one of the main tasks in the construction of a shared European citizenship, but it also encourages reflective and critical thought as an essential tool for life-long learning.

European Added Value

Implementing a Comenius partnership has in itself an additional effect concerning European identity. “Dilemmas” is going to create links among four schools that will permit many students and staff members to communicate in several ways, including personal meetings in each country that are so important to enhance the overall knowledge about different European educational systems.

We expect to facilitate exchange of effective teaching methodologies, encouraging the collaboration and the exchange of ideas, practices and teaching strategies between the teachers from each school and their European colleagues.

We will use English as a vehicle language to allow communication among people with four different mother languages as Danish, German, Romanian and Spanish, which will have a positive effect in increasing the awareness of the possibilities of cooperation between European citizens, and not only in the educational field: we hope that our students (and the teachers too) are going to develop a more self-confident attitude towards their own chances of having success in that field in the future, both in their academic or professional lives.

On the other hand, the focus of the project on social and civic competence has a great relevance too. While discussing practical dilemmas with students in other countries, our pupils will gradually increase their awareness of belonging to a shared citizenship frame, which includes significant differences (and therefore the need of attitudes of respect and tolerance), but also includes integrated standards concerning essential values and human rights.