The world is changing and this is our contribution.

The world is changing rapidly and both pupils and teachers need to acquire new skills and competences. Changes such as environmental problems, the expansion of the digital era, economic crisis and the inclusion of people from other countries are the issues young people will have to face.

The theme of our project is body of water. Pupils will be active participants in several multidisciplinary learning activities to deal with this topic from various points of view.

During the process, they will also learn about how to document the learning process, how to disseminate the results and evaluate the process.

About 2000 students and over 100 teachers will be involved directly, and indirectly, parents, local stakeholders, companies, universities and other schools nearby will know about the project.

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We are all together five comprehensive schools from Finland, Greece, Poland, Portugal and Spain. Our school Järvenpään Yhteiskoulu in Järvenpää, Finland, is the coordinator of the project. This is a two-year EU-funded project, and we are now in the middle of it – although we began preparing for the project and searching for the partners in eTwinning platform already two years ago.

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Because the theme of our project is the body of the water, one remarkable criterion in choosing the partner schools was that they are situated near a body of water, either a lake, a river or the sea. We believed that the students and teachers of the schools would therefore have a strong connection to the body of the water nearby and are willing to learn about it from many perspectives and also they would want to make an effort to protect it.

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Both teaching and learning are undergoing a major reform due to the rapidly changing world. In the future our pupils will need a new set of skills and understanding to deal with the 21st century challenges. One challenge among others is that the pupils learn to take responsibility of their learning and create agency in their own education.

As said in the OECD work “The future and education of skills” : ”future-ready students need to exercise agency” - which means the capacity of acting and sense of ownership – “in their own education and throughout life”.

 Agency implies a sense of responsibility to participate in the world and in so doing to influence people, events and circumstances for the BETTER”.

Pedagogical basis, new set of skills

Our project tries to answer the 21st century challenges by creating learning environments where the students can practice their creativity, critical thinking, active citizenship and they are promoted taking agency in their learning. The project’s pedagogic basis lies on phenomenon-based learning environments which are based on the vision that in the future the students will need not only disciplinary knowledge but also creativity to think across the boundaries of disciplines.

Our belief is that learning environments, that enable creative and critical thinking and aim at students agency in their learning, promote them facing the challenges of the future.

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In our project the bodies of water are studied from the arts-based and scientific points of views taking into account the different forms of media. Our project aims at supporting students to understand how the body of water has influenced the communities and their culture, how they differ in each country and what environmental problems are faced. During the project, both teachers and students practice their ICT skills on various ways. Teachers also get a chance to develop their teaching practices in phenomenon based learning environments, and they create and share material, which is pedagogically valid for phenomenon-based learning.

Structure

Our project consists of the pre-activities and the learning/teaching and training weeks which include students’ visits to the participating schools. The pupils in every school do pre-activities between the LTT’s and share their learning processes and the results on eTwinning platform or during the learning teaching and training weeks.

We try to involve as many pupils as possible in the participating schools. By doing the pre-activities at our schools we can increase the number of the students who participate the project hands-on.

During the LTT’s teachers and students from all the schools visit each others’ schools and participate the program which is designed from a certain angle on the theme body of water. They were decided according to the interest and the specialities of the partners.

What has been done?

In the LTT’s and doing the pre-activities the students have had opportunities to create and analyse art in different forms: they have composed music themselves, learned to sing and play songs about bodies of water, performed them and analysed the music and lyrics that are inspired by the body of water. They have written visual poems, poems about trash, and stories about water. The students have also created visual art by taking photos, painting, making mobiles and creating digital multimodal art presentations that combine texts in different forms: music, photos or videos and literature.

Students have practiced their media skills by making presentations about their schools, hometowns and countries. They have made advertisements on various topics (for example water sports during the LTT in Spain), and they have practiced critical thinking by making anti-ads (during the LTT in Finland). They have also written opinion texts and given and taken feedback from them.

The students have done scientifical research on the features of water (for example measuring oxygen, ph and temperature during different seasons). They have discovered the fauna of the lake, river or the sea and presented them to their co-learners during this week in Poland. Also, we have had a great opportunity to come to visit the University of Rzeszow and to participate in the workshops.

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One important aspect in promoting students agency in their own learning processes, is creating space and giving different kinds of tools for them to reflect and evaluate their own learning. In this project the students have practiced reflecting and evaluating for example using apps, such as Flipgrid and Padlet.

Also, the students have practiced presenting the learning processes and results in public. We have organized symposiums where the students present their posters and digital presentations of the learning processes and results and share them with each others and the whole schools. Through our webpage and eTwinning the processes can be shared internationally.

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The whole process of participating in this kind of projects is a holistic experience in which you get a chance to build agency in your learning by having chances of thinking creatively and critically. According to the data collected after the Finnish LTT week, the students, their parents and the teachers involved in the project have found the project rewarding, and they appreciate the possibility to practice international collaboration and communication.

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