Food Connects Europe

"“Food Connects Europe” The project ""Food Connects Europe"" was a cross-curricular approach to the overall topic of food. Food is an integral and motivating part of each students' every-day life and therefore offers a hands-on motivating and tangible approach to abstract concepts and ideas. Food with its cultivation, preparation and communal consumption is a form of cultural heritage. It is a dynamic, living product, and helps to create social bonds and understanding as it shows and maintains cultural difference. The projects' objectives can be summarized as follows: Employment Opportunities This project helped our students to gain an informed perspective into employment and opportunities available, helped to decide on their future careers and motivated them to pursue one. The collaboration with outside food related business partners paved the way for future cooperation. We got to know a variety of employment sectors, jobs and opportunities for further education by cooperating with schools for further education, visiting companies, doing interviews and research Entrepreneurship ""Food Connects Europe"" gave students the chance to use communication skills and business knowledge to establish enterprise schemes at all partner schools enabling them to undertake activities which engaged them with challenges and applications from the business world and helped them to acquire enterprise skills in real life situations. Student groups founded mini-food-businesses, created business plans including calculations, advertisements, etc., produced food products and sold it at International Food Sales during the exchange visits Bridging social gaps / Integration The project aimed to bridge cultural gaps between the participating European countries, schools and students as well as in-between citizens with different cultural backgrounds living together in one community by improving the inter-cultural understanding of our schools and our local communities. We used the topic food as a hands on approach to share cultural heritage. Students took part in International Food Events during the exchanges, cooking together, etc. Europe as a shared market The aim was for pupils to gain a better understanding of Europe as a shared market and the importance of a healthy lifestyle. Exploring and researching topics like healthy lifestyles in different countries, trade routes and origins of different products, food quality seals and their meaning, fair trade and prices of food in different countries. On a structural level all partner schools adressed the challenges of implementing careers guidance; using the CLIL approach to teach English as a foreign language; and integrating migrating children in the community by exchanging practices, experiences, methods and concepts, as well as developing new ideas for their school curricula. All partner schools involved the whole school community including teachers, students, parents, outside partner organizations and the local community during different parts of the project. During the five learning/teaching/training activities with students we shared and produced results, organized international food sales and cook-outs, researched a variety of topics, visited food production and food distributing businesses, gained knowledge about careers in the food industry/agriculture, tried to bridge social and cultural differences, made lifelong experiences, started to deconstruct stereotypes, promoted respect and tolerance, worked on conceptuals ideas on integration of refugee/magrating children, careers guidance, CLIL and evaluated the projects progress."