My dear
friends,
I have joined this project because we were
living extraordinary times and your proposal was the most relevant one. All
schools in Europe, and the world, really, were going through a new reality, a
strange reality.
It seemed
an impossible task to change the way we used to teach in such a short period of
time.
Could
teachers and students cope with this new reality?
The Project
“Enjoy Distance Learning” seemed to be a good way to get some answers and we
weren’t wrong.
It is my
opinion that involving teachers and students in eTwinning projects contributes
to a complementary, if not as important as, way of exploring the curriculum. At
the same time, they encourage students to explore educational tools available
to the most part of them.
There is a
downside: not all students in our countries have the necessary financial and
technical resources to put it in practice. That is something that should, and
it does, worry us.
The outcome
has clearly overcome these setbacks. Both students and teachers were
enthusiastic about the activities carried out in these months, despite all the
difficulties of distance learning.
The
activities have encouraged students to go beyond the results. They have opened
up the students’ minds to a different culture with its traditions, symbols and specificities.
Plus, students were able to understand each other by using a foreign language,
common in their curriculum.
Our
youngsters need to see the routines of other nations so they can come to the
conclusion that we are all equal, both in happiness and in troubled times.
That’s what they saw in our webinars and chat activities. They realised that
their Turkish friends were going through the same difficult situation.
That is
learning. That is character building.
What we
hope our students will have learnt from this project is exactly that: people
are happy or sad in the same way, no matter the culture or the country, and
difficulties can be overthrown by communicating. Not clamming up on themselves.
I genuinely
hope we can repeat the experience in a couple of years and testify the enduring
impression this project has left on all of us.
José Paulo Costa (Lustosa, Portugal)
