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DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT

CITIES (Cities in Transition Investigated by European Students), is a project of a network of 5 European secondary schools from Germany, Norway, Poland, Spain and The Netherlands intended to run for 3 years.

 

In this project students from the upper secondary years will investigate the past, present and future of the European city. They will understand the significance of this entity for our society and will become more active citizens thinking of and improving the future of the cities they live in, which will be the case studies for this project. Comparing and contrasting the cities of the participating schools will allow them a deeper insight into the topic from a European perspective making them aware of similarities and differences, which will then lead to a more thorough discussion of the future of the European city so that a transnational approach seems to be more than desirable.

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The city has been a concept central to European civilisation since Antiquity. Studying this concept in depth will enable students to understand our present society better and enable them to deal with present and future challenges to the city or their cities as well as develop an idea of the model future European city and society. They will be facilitated not only to work actively and to carry out sound research in this project but also to become more active citizens thus strengthening the idea of European citizenship as well as their entrepreneurship skills by making an actual impact on their communities.

Current and future challenges to European cities are manifold: an aging population, energy and environment issues, transportation, housing, immigration, participation and government are only some relevant issues. Making students aware of these challenges in a European framework and facilitating them, the future citizens, to learn to develop strategies to deal with these challenges seems vital in order to ensure a livable future in the European city.

 

To achieve these goals, CITIES pursues the main objective to develop central basic and transversal skills of students and teachers in the fields of entrepreneurship and citizenship, language competence and digital skills.

 

Students shall develop their entrepreneurship skills to become more active citizens and have an actual, albeit small, impact on their present and future city. This will be achieved by identifying problem areas as well as development potential in the participating cities. The students will then initiate a debate in the local community about the future development of the city by chosing at least one concrete issue from their prior investigation (they will contact local newspapers, meet town officials, etc.).

 

Since communication competences are fundamental to living in the present and future European city, students will also continuously improve their language skills in their native language as well as in English during their work, e.g. they will communicate in groups both face to face and online (e.g. on eTwinning and through blogs), write different kinds of texts (e.g. articles or leaflets), and develop their public speaking and debating skills. CLIL methodology will be applied and further developed to ensure the students' progress in both subject / content and language skills (e.g. scaffolding, focus on speech acts, promoting academic interaction skills, code switching).

 

Digital skills will be an integral part of the life in the future European city and thus be used and trained in all stages of the project, which means that enhancing digital integration in learning, teaching and training is another objective of CITIES. Students will use ICT to communicate (via a blog, eTwinning, etc.), do research (on the internet, use search engines, etc.), publish results (with the help of text processing programs, Powerpoint, Prezi, etc.) and reach wider audiences (creating a film, using websites like eTwinning, etc.).

 

Students will also acquire new content and subject knowledge about the term "city", the development of the European city, its function and present state and its present as well as future challenges. To further transversal skills and reciprocal learning a cross-curricular approach will be employed and different subjects such as geography, politics, history, biology and art will be addressed.

 

Many of these objectives are also relevant to the teachers as they will use innovative teaching methods (e.g. CLIL, project work, focus on learning outcomes), develop their language and ICT skills as well as get a new idea of what European citizenship means. Focussing on skills and learning outcomes they will also design innovative teaching resources and materials and contribute to their schools' curricula, which is part of the development of a European area of skills and qualifications.

 

Thus the schools as organisations will benefit from the development and improvement of teaching methodology and from the promotion and establishing of internationalisation.