CULTURAL FESTIVALS

Nowadays people can travel very long distances easily or they can start communicating with a complete stranger in a few seconds via internet. Every day contains major events taking place in parts of Europe and having a significant impact on other parts of Europe. We sometimes need to travel around Europe or communicate with other people from other cultures or beliefs. We have stereotypes about other people as we do not know them, their culture, their attitudes, their daily lives. If we knew all these aspects of them, we would not have these condescending prejudices because we would not feel threatened by them. As a result of people interacting, there has been an increasing need to know different cultures and people who have different approaches in their daily lives and have different beliefs or other point of views. We should all have the experience of other people's lives in other parts of Europe so that our behavior would not be driven by false prejudices.It is very important that the pupils get the opportunity to think about their prejudices and to talk about them with young people from all over the Europe. An important way to help them do that is to bring them into contact with other teens to get to know each other better and to learn more about their culture.Young people need to meet in order to develop an understanding and tolerance for other cultures and beliefs in order to make the world a better place. Our aim is to break stereotypes, learn about themselves and each other, harmonize by working together and sharing each other's daily lives and reach linguistic diversity and intercultural awareness. The project is based on breaking stereotypes by revealing the values, finding out the similarities and differences and creating a basis for dialogue among people from different backgrounds. This project will remove the psychological barriers and physical boundaries and help building a friendly atmosphere among the European citizens that also influences and supports a more peaceful and safer Europe.We hope that a strong motivation for our pupils and staff to achieve the objectives of this project in terms of teamwork, social relations, planning and implementing the project, the means of not only information about each other's experiences, but also participating in a partnership with schools using varied communication technologies. Surveys, interviews, checklists, self assesment forms, quizzes, drama, structured play, questioning and self-monitoring will be used as the methods of the activities. As a lasting result, our theme will allow cultural interaction in a holistic manner including all senses mentioned in the project.1 Staff training event and 4 European Cultural Festivals will be carried out during the meetings.Our topics are: How to be a cultural ambassador? - National and Religious Festivals - Spreading Local Music in Europe - Europe is my home - Archiving Treasures of Europe by audiobookEuropean Cultural Festivals will be open to other students and teachers of the school and from neighboring schools, to families, representatives of authorities, companies, media etc. The pupils will be selected according to the willingness and the context of the activity.The results of our project will be the raised language and ICT skills, gained knowledge about cultures, open attitude and tolerant towards other cultures, European integration, strengthening tights among the participating countries, videos about musical and drama shows, audiobooks.The project refers to a local, regional, national, European and international problem. Multicultural understanding through the activities builds an authentic material that plays a big role in this type of experience-based project to create a lasting change within the individual person involved in the project. Since we combine the practical encounter with the theoretical elements that are used over the internet, we hope to cultivate a deeper understanding as well as the meetings create emotional impressions. We want to create opportunities to increase the ability to understand different cultures for a sustainable multicultural Europe. Thanks to the activities, the materials, the multilingual project website and Twinspace, we will reach the desired impacts at the local, regional, national, European and international levels by making the participants and the stakeholders get a wider understanding about the human rights, the equality of opportunity, the discrimination, the radicalism and the tolerance for foreigners.