Project EdTWIN

Project EdTwin: Nurturing the common educational area bottom-up

Thirteen years have passed since the inception of the educational cooperation in what later became CENTROPE – a cooperation which has now led to the creation of an educational framework for the region. Together with other activities within the ‘EdTwin’ project this new tool will further foster the fruitful cooperation that has brought up so many benefits, especially for the pupils.

A fruitful cooperation for a common educational framework

The cooperation in the field of education in the four-country region has been successfully developed during the past thirteen years. In order to inspire a real, stable and reliable educational standard across the region, the current EdTwin project has just elaborated a fixed framework for the identification of skills and aptitudes necessary for a flourishing communication and cooperation within the region. The three-year long research work culminated with the formulation of five core competences: communicative, social, strategic, knowledge and intercultural competence. As Petra Feichtinger from the European Office of the Vienna Board of Education stipulates, the new framework represents a real “source and inspiration for the concrete inclusion of these skills in school curricula across the four-country region”.

The EdTwin Programme: an EU initiative towards educational cooperation

Consequently, there are already plans to bring the framework into life, i.e. to use it effectively in schools. A first pilot will be launched at the Komensky School in Vienna with the beginning of the new school year in autumn 2011. [Satz jetzt mitübersetzen, ggf. Ende März streichen!] By this, the framework shall serve as an instructive model for the potentials of cooperation in the region, especially in connection with other results of the project EdTwin – Education Twinning for European Citizenship, an EU-subsidised educational initiative within the so called „Objective 3” of the European territorial cooperation 2007-2013. The partnership carrying the project mostly consists of the supervisory school authorities of the partner cities, except for Hungary, where the responsible institution is a polytechnic college.

Building on successful preceding projects, the general aim of EdTwin is to contribute to the sustainable development of the CENTROPE region through school partnerships between the involved cities and thus to prepare students and teachers for their personal and professional life in the inter-connected region. The partnership and the network that goes with it is developed thanks to diverse activities that exist within the EdTwin programme, such as organisation of educational programmes (seminars, courses, workshops etc.), exchange programmes and the elaboration of joint multilingual educational materials. One of these initiatives was the establishment of the “BildungsRaum CENTROPE” in Vienna, where e.g. pupils from the partner regions can learn one of the languages during a three-day crash course and have then one day to use their newly gained knowledge in practical situations.

One twin out of three: the Austrian-Czech partnership

Exemplary for the three mirror EdTwin partnerships, the cooperation between the Czech and the Austrian EdTwin partners consists of two areas of activities: on the one hand activities for teachers and pupils at elementary and secondary schools, which is organised by the Service Centre for Schools Brno in cooperation with the key partner Vienna City School Board, and on the other hand activities organised between the partner schools.

The activities that are developed directly under the EdTwin cooperation concern all measures that serve to support teachers’ and pupils’ educational skills, such as German/Czech language courses during summer holidays; mutual understanding of the different educational systems through observation visits of teachers; organisation of seminars and workshops for teachers and a one-week international workshop for students focusing on film, theatre and photography.

The partnership between the concrete schools reveals to be fruitful and more and more popular. As indicates Věra Hlavsová, Head of Education of the Service Centre for Schools Brno, “during the project the cooperation extended to a total of 10 secondary schools and 3 primary schools in the South Moravian Region and Vienna, including some with multiple project activities or subsequent follow-up projects. School activities are mainly focused on operation of fictitious companies and discovering the culture and history of each region. Reports on the activities show that students appreciate the cooperation and see it as truly beneficial.”

EdTwin – Education Twinning for European Citizenship