Heroes and Cultural Identity Project
Role of the Participating Institutions
The role of each institution will be similar:
- selection of suitable groups to involve in preparation of materials and reflection on heroes and cultural identity
- publicising of voting system and the results of the votes.
There will be additional work in terms of administering the voting process, designing posters/medals/certificates, maintaining the notice board and monitoring progress generally so as to adjust the work as we proceed.
Some translation may be needed to ensure that students can understand and appreciate the promotional materials from other countries.
It will be important to maintain an inclusive ethos within the project so that all students and schools can feel involved. The voting structure must be carefully designed and adjusted so that there are winners in each country and each school, and it will be important that project meetings oversee this.
It will also be important for meetings to maintain the educational quality of the project (in terms of material preparation and reflection on cultural identity) so that these are not obscured by the more 'populist' aspects. The two categories of voting - quality of presentation and the hero - should help maintain this balance.
ACTIVE PARTICIPATION
This project is very student-centred and should encourage maximum participation. Students are involved at every stage - from selecting the figures to be promoted as heroes, to researching materials and evaluation (in the form of voting on both quality of materials and the heroes themselves). The wide variety of levels of participation - from in-depth research to voting, means that it should be easy for a wide range of students to be involved.
INTEGRATION INTO THE CURRICULUM
The flexible nature of the heroes concept will allow teachers full scope to integrate project work with their specific disciplines in terms of preparing materials and reflecting on results. Voting can take place during class time or by the students themselves outside class time. For the non-English speaking partners it will provide an additional exercise in an informal but nevertheless motivating way.
PROGRAMME OF MOBILITY
Two meetings of all the partners per year - one in the spring (March/April), one in the autumn (October).
As there are six partners the following plan is suggested, based on the idea of having meetings in schools which have more experience of Comenius at the beginning of the year; schools with perhaps less experience at the end of the school year.
That would give us the following three year programme:
- Scotland (October 2006)
- Poland (March/April 2007)
- Norway (October 2007)
- Turkey (March/April 2008)
- Slovakia (October 2008)
- Italy (March/April 2008)
