The Sea Connection – trade, environment, migration and social challenges as links between four European coastal cities
This website belongs to a group of four schools from around Europe participating in an Erasmus+ project, partially funded by the EU programme. In this project, which started in 2018 and will be finishing in 2020, the four schools from Hamburg, Stockholm, Venice and Barcelona will be working on a series of topics that you will find explained below.
Harbors have always been doorways to the world. They have shaped and modeled the character andmain features of the cities they belong to. Their economy, environment and culture have been strongly influenced by their existence. In a time when nations are building up walls to defend theirborders, waterfront cities will always be open and exposed to migrations, environmental threats, and movement of goods. We would like to raise awareness among our students on the marine environmental issues and their interdependence, as well as the movement of people and goodsinherent in the life of a harbor.Our project “The Sea Connection – trade, environment, migration and social challenges as links between four European coastal cities” will be carried out by four schools: Gymnasium Altona(Hamburg, Germany), IIS Benedetti Tommaseo (Venice, Italy) , Liceo Palcam SLU (Barcelona,Spain) and Tyska Skolan (Stockholm, Sweden). It aims to raise our students’ and the whole communities’ awareness on the current and future challenges waterfront cities have to face.
The students of our schools will be the next generation of citizens who should be prepared to take responsibility to tackle these challenges.The participants of the project will be teachers of a variety of subjects, experienced in interdisciplinary teaching; students aged 10 to 17 at each of the schools and external stakeholderslike NGOs, port authorities, museums and universities. The students will be taking part in different stages of the project and collaborating in a wide variety of activities that will lead to theaccomplishment of a series of objectives. Within that age group, about 100 students aged 14 to 17 from Hamburg, Venice, Barcelona and Stockholm will be participating in the four international short-term exchanges that we will be taking place during the 23 months of life of this project.
Through the planning, preparation and creation of short-films, art and learning materials in the form ofe-books, our students will be learning about the past, present and future of our harbors and our cities.They will also discover the connections between our cities and their relationship within the European Union frame that will enable them to trace our similarities as members of the EU and develop a self-perception as members of it.In addition, they will be doing research about the consequences and the benefits of having fully operational harbors in our cities. The students will focus on the environmental issues produced bythem, how pollution together with transport affects the fauna and flora. Moreover, we also want ourstudents to learn about trade, tourism and migration and their different forms and situations in each ofour cities.All the activities of this project are aimed at teenagers. Our main concern is to allow them to be the center of the learning process. They will be the ones doing the necessary research, taking care of the development of the activities and of the creation of all the products in the project. We want to foster their research and cooperative skills, and the perfect tool for that is a combination of PBL methodology and cooperative work. The learners will have to come up with answers and solutions to a variety of problems they will have to face in the creation process. They will have to learn how to work within international groups, discuss, negotiate and cooperate in order to come up with a final product that solves the problems that worked as a starting point of each of the projects. This fused methodology of Problem Based Learning and Cooperative work will be combined with an active use of new technologies that will enable the students to succeed in the whole process of research, planning and creation of the final products. These learning processes will lead our students towards a better understanding of the reality of their cities in terms of environmental, migratory and trade issues among the four European countries and far beyond their borders. We will be working to favor the development of a sense of responsible European citizenship in our students and to foster their civic engagement with respect to environmental and migrant’s issues.
