The Angevins, a European dynasty: testimonies, settlements, relics

ContextThe project addresses the needs to implement a competence based teaching and a competence oriented learning through practical activities, starting from an interesting historical topic: the Angevin dynasty. It aims to bring into structured and cooperative communication several European countries which experienced the Angevin domination between the XIII and the XV centuries. Since the Angevin dynasty had a great influence on regional and national medieval policies the projects aims to explore, discover and understand the cultural, political and socio-economic effects that such domination produced in parts of Europe that are distant from one another and very different in terms of language, history and traditions.ObjectivesThe project has the aim of promoting intercultural awareness, integration and active European citizeship. Its main objectives are to improve students’ linguistic and communicative competences and digital skills and to implement an intercultural knowledge that will make them more open-minded and ready to accept otherness. The project will allow students to come accross different contexts, to socialize through international meetings that will encourage a deep intercultural dialogue among all the participants who will have, as a consequence, the opportunity to acquire a deeper global awareness, to enhance their ability to respect differences and to exhibit a responsible behaviour, both socially and environmentally.The schools involved in the project will have the opportunity to enrich their educational values through the acquisition of a more European identity.ParticipantsThe project is carried out by 5 partner schools from Italy, France, Hungary, Poland and Croatia. Each school will involve 25 students, 5 for each mobility, aged from 16 to 18, belonging to the classes that study history and topics connected to the Angevin dynasty. For each mobility there will be two accompanying teachers from each partner school. All other teachers engaged in the project management, as well as all the other students of each school, will contribute to the arrangement of the planned activities and events in their own school.ActivitiesThe project features 5 student exchanges, one in each country involved, and a first mobility for the staff training that will involve two teachers from each partner school and will take place in Italy. During each transnational meeting, students will be guided to visit and explore each one of the territories chosen for the project in order to know the elements of the Angevin heritage and to get in touch with the material evidence of Angevin settlements in those areas. Photo collections, videos and research will be carried out by the students who will also take part in workshops and indoor activities in each host school in order to analyse and discuss their discoveries and opinions. MethodologyThe students will be introduced to a different way of studying history and art, in non-formal contexts and in more stimulating ways, outside the usual school walls. The methodology adopted will include practical activities which favour learning by doing: Project Based Learning, workshops, cooperative learning, peer to peer learning, flipped clasroom. Besides, the use of ICT in each phase of the project will motivate the students’ interest in the subject matter and foster learning and acquisition of digital skills at the same time.ResultsThe concrete result of the whole research carried out in all the territories visited will be a virtual museum with virtual walls, pictures and 3D elements, a sort of historical museum online, containing aspects of the history of all countries involved, with a focus on the Angevin dynasty, available to anyone who wants to know about the topic. The intended outcomes of the whole project will be the enhancement of students’ linguistic and communicative skills, an improvement of their social and civic competences, a stronger awareness of countries’ artistic and cultural heritage and a clearer understanding of the European citizenship. The project will also have an impact on the participating teachers who will acquire a better awareness about new methodologies and will have the opportunity to share good practices with teachers from other countries.Long term benefitsThe project results will be spread through a variety of dissemination channels, so to allow a great amount of people and groups to benefit from it in the long term. Pupils and their families will gain a greater intercultural awareness and a better understanding of diversity in general. Teachers will enrich their knowledge about teaching methodologies and their style through the comparison with other educational realities. The schools and the local institutions that will know about the project will have the chance to belong to a new network of relations that will allow cooperation and exchange between different countries’ institutions in various fields, not only the educational one.