European students to the world via food and ICT: are we really what we eat?
Students from Italy, Greece and Hungary explore their own and each other’s countries, and then the whole world, as seen through the food that is eaten in the different places. Their journey is a virtual one, but the exchange of experiences is real, with regular meetings via Skype, and a blog http://secondagineuropa.blogspot.it/ a TwinSpace http://twinspace.etwinning.net/1291/home and the EXPO2015 community http://www.togetherinexpo2015.it/ as meeting points. In their journey through the world, students find out that the food of a country can tell us a lot about its natural environment, history, economy and even religion. The project, which was born out of the urge to find an alternative to the traditional book in Geography teaching, soon developed into something more: Geography learned not by reading a book or watching a documentary, but by meeting and making friends with peers from abroad. Geography not as a list of data about a country but as something alive, told by those who live in those countries. The partners in the project were three, but the EXPO2015 website gave us the opportunity to meet students from all over the world. The blog SecondaGiNeuropa got more than 11.000 visits in a bunch of months, and the students published around 400 articles. We tried out some simple exercises of flipped classroom: students had to work in groups to present an aspect of a chosen country via food, choosing an ICT tool from a list given by the teacher: the tool-testing had to be performed at home, the realization of the product and the publishing in the blog or TwinSpace at school, in a given time. All of the teams (first national, then international teams) managed to complete the tasks, boosting their creativity (thus their learning) in the process. The involved classes registered a dramatic increase in basic competences in Geography (in attachment, the graphics). It was a very successful project in terms of development of students’ competences via the use of ICT.
At first, our objective as teachers was to find an alternative to the use of the text book in the teaching of Geography. We wanted to prove that Geography can stop being felt by students as boring (having to learn by heart the names of mountains, lakes, rivers, capitals etc.) and it can be transformed in a subject perceived for what it is: a picture of real places, inhabited by real people, with their stories, culture, ideas. Later on through the project we started working on the idea of the EU as a an union of different countries, that yet have something in common and support each other (a very important topic at the moment!). Of course, we had all the objectives connected with the subject of Geography: correct use of the specific language of the subject, understanding the anthropic and natural elements in a territory, respect of natural resources, understanding European common roots, understanding the relationship between natural environment – economy – history of a country. We also had objectives linked to the use of ICT: understanding the correct use of a tool, being able to respect copyrights, understanding the opportunities and risks of the web. The means used to reach those goals are ICT tools, peer learning, team working (in national and international teams), simple experiences in flipped classroom. The use of ICT tools was kept as free as possible in order to boost creativity. This trick turned the tasks into fun and soon the blog became addictive for the students! Eventually, all of the objectives were attained, at different levels, by all the students.
We have 2 Italian classes + 2 teachers, 1 Hungarian class + 2 teachers, 1 Greek class + 2 teachers: about 100 students + 6 teachers. The families show a good participation, take part in all of the dissemination events, and so do the different Municipalities of the involved schools. The blog has a good amount of monthly visitors, both from our schools (students of non-involved classes browsing the blog for their studies) and from all over the world, presumably thank to the EXPO2015 activities (see the chart on the top right of the blog homepage to see the different nationalities of visitors).
They can reuse our working plan for the teaching of Geography, as other classes will in our school for the next school year. They can see that we cannot teach Geography as they did in 1900. Today, Geography is both more complex and more exciting, as there’s the whole world of knowledge in it (from Science to Technology, from Economics to History, from Natural Sciences to Biology). We want our students to taste a little bit of each. So we have to introduce the subject in a way that it is felt as alive: cooperating with partners from different nationalities, learning by doing and exchanging, working in teams, preferably international teams, getting first-hand information from those who live in a different country, feeling free to explore the countries and the ICT tools to get to know first, and then present them. We chose food as the leading image in our journey, but other themes can be chosen of course. It is the journey that matters. Other schools and teachers can see that, even if we don’t use traditional means (test book, individual study, traditional essays, etc.), our students get more involved, so they perform better even in traditional tests.