Beyond Borders: Uniting Countries through eTwinning What happens when two schools separated by over a thousand kilometres decide to speak to one another? Our recent eTwinning project “Framing well-being”, which brought together students from Italy and Poland, can answer that!
Despite our different backgrounds, we discovered that we all speak the same “language”: the language of emotions.
This project has been going on for some months now, months filled with quite a few interesting exchanges: to get to know each other, our teachers got us create complete profiles, with dedicated real-life accurate pictures and even a personal description about ourselves, written by ourselves! We then used this info to play a sort of “game”: through a video meeting, we would call up two to three students, let them present themselves and interact with each other temporarily, and then each student tried to guess who, from the other class, they just spoke to; this was so interesting! We got to learn about each other, our likes and dislikes, our personalities, and not only that, but we discovered the “chemistry” and many other things in common present between us even if we’re so far away from one another, it was a really grounding experience and an honestly amazing start to this whole thing.
Having now gotten to know each other, at least slightly, would mean that the second and arguably most interesting part of this event was coming up: group projects!
Our teachers divided us in seven teams, each having three Italian students and two Polish students, and we were assigned an engaging task: making a so-called “mood board” about the things that make us teenagers happy and sad in both Poland and Italy, so that we could compare and understand each other better. The core of this task was the communication needed between students, which required us to use English to its maximum efficiency with the goal of understanding each other in the clearest way possible: spoilers, it worked! All groups interacted with the students they were paired with from the other school; some made calls, some video called, some even shared social media contacts! Through all this we managed to learn about the habits, thoughts and general opinions of students from the other country: it was actually surprisingly similar! (though with some notable differences here and there, of course…)
We’re all so glad to be able to be part of this project, because its given us a chance to get to know more people as well as a chance to work on and understand ourselves and others, causing noticeable self-growth in everyone thanks to their participation. We really do look forward to exchanging more interactions with our Polish friends!
Edoardo Caruso, Alessandro Girboiu, Michelangelo Morando – 3AIA
