"<< Objectives >>Project ""Return to roots"" is a collaborative project of 5 partners from all around Europe. The project is designed for student of age 15 to 19 years. Priority : Social and educational value of European cultural heritage, its asset for creating jobs, economic growth and social cohesion. Through this project, we would like to prepare value oriented education for the students. This will be done by the activities, which are designed to promote the particular regions of the partner countries.<< Implementation >>Student Cookery book of national cuisine - detailed recipes of some traditional dishes.Songbook of the best-known folk songs - songbook of their traditional folk songs.Film - Video tutorial : how to study selected cultural-historical objects of their region and afterwards they teach and inform their partners.Photobook - “Monuments of UNESCO in my region” and “Photobook of folk costumes”.WORKSHOPS and EXCURSION - a visit to a historic site of folk architectureCRAFT - demonstration of the cho<< Results >>In connection with the project's objectives:Bridging the intercultural, intergenerational, and social gap; Human Rights and the Rule of Law; Democracy and Inclusive Democratic Participation - we expect to raise students' proEuropean awareness. Our effort is to show the positive aspects of the coexistence of nations in the ethnic environment, the degree of democracy, and inclusion, but also evaluate the negatives of this coexistence and discuss solutions for the future."

The project STEPS4Schools deals with aspects of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) that should be introduced and promoted in the course of the project. In a first step, the aspect of sustainable tourism shall form the general topic for implementing aspects of learning business English, improving entrepreneurial skills (as marketing, tourism and project management), applying ICTtools and cooperating in an international group. In a second stage, the range of topics will be enlarged by dealing with further Sustainable Development Goals that will be chosen by individual schools on the basis of local requirements and topical interests. The 6 schools involved all have a vocational background although their profiles differ. By means of that, each school can contribute a specific approach to the topic and take care of a particular field of interest. Most of the teachers involved have a lot of experience in carrying out international projects and can contribute a lot of knowledge in various fields.The main aims of the project are to teach students about the UN SDGs. They should be made aware of the problems facing our planet but also that there are solutions to these problems. By pursuing these Sustainable Development Goals students should be enabled to make a valuable contribution to improving environmental, social and economic aspects of our societies and to pursue practicable solutions to challenges on different levels. Already as students they should be put in a position to assess information, evaluate reports and take responsible decisions for our future.Devising concepts in one concrete field - sustainable tourism - they should come up with practicable soultions that can be tried out and implemented in practice. The project shall empower them to gain the necessary skills and knowledge in order to be able to act as responsible citizens and take fact-based decisions. These are qualities that will also be important in their future professionsl lives.Furthermore, this project will also demonstrate that nowadays occurences have a far wider scope beyond the borders of the European Union. In an ever more interdependent world it is necessary to look beyond boundaries and be open for worldwide developments.To reach these goals of the project students will be invoved in various learning processes. They will increase their language proficiency in English, but will also be challenged to translate brochures and other content material into other languages or seek help from people capoble of that. This is necessary because of the internationalisation of toursim which calls for addressing touriists in their mother tongue.They will gain enhanced IT knowledge that will be needed for sourcing information, implementing tasks and disseminating project results. One special aspect in connection therewith will be the documentation of certain steps of the project, filmed material about the final results and the appropriate provision of this material for further use by stakeholders and other people interested. This will take the usual dissemination process one step further than previous projects and calls for speciel equipment and knowledge about application of videotaped media and related productions.On top of that, they will have to build up cooperations with stakeholders like travel and tourism representatives and other stakeholders involved in the field.They will have to learn how to organise and market events and projects and finally evaluate the outcome of these.Working with people not known to each other before and with disabled and disadvantaged people will pose a challenge, but also a great chance of learning both on an emotianal level and on an intercultural level. Finetuning touristic concepts to customers´ needs requires a lot of knowledge about certain aspects of culture and habits, therefore the exchange of knowledge and ideas on an international level between students is of utmost importance. The experience of working in an international group on a level of strong cooperation will provide invaluable experience for the students´ future lives and put them in position to act in an appropriate way. (We know about this aspect from previous project, where the compulsion to work together on an international level has proved very vital for the project.)All in all, the project will offer a valuable contribution to societies in Europe and supply workable solutions to various problems.

This is a follow-on project from the ECML project PlurCur (2012-2015, www.ecml.at/plurcur). The project’s aims are to develop further the plurilingual, inclusive and intercultural whole school policy by means of both new and existing partner schools in secondary education in an international context. The innovation of this project will be that it is based on version 2 of the plurilingual whole school curricula (see Allgäuer-Hackl/Brogan/Henning/Hufeisen/Schlabach 2015) and that in Plur>E, we will focus on involving school administration and educational politics.Plurilingual whole school policies are designed in such a way that languages taught as subjects are not treated in isolation and language and content-matter subject instruction overlap so that content-matter teaching is also language teaching. This consistent implementation of content and language integrated learning will be transferable to all non-language content lessons. The languages to be used will include languages already present at a given institution, i.e. family/heritage/migrant languages, modern languages taught at the school and the language of schooling.The multilingual approach to language teaching and learning also means that learners get insights into the structure of languages, study possibilities of positive transfer and interferences between the languages they use, train productive and receptive skills, develop metalinguistic and crosslinguistic awareness as well as language learning strategies and strategies of language use. In this way, we aim at developing competencies that go beyond individual languages, and plurilingual proficiency, a concept that will have to be defined, described and assessed into more detail in the course of the present project.Given that classrooms all over Europe are becoming more and more intercultural and multilingual, teachers are facing the challenge to provide learning opportunities which use those competencies and skills which learners bring with them to their learning environment, and this includes different levels of skills in a large variety of languages. The main target group will be students and teachers in secondary education. Decision makers (school management, educational politics) will also be targeted.The main outputs will be:1) Results in form of reports and best practice examples by the partner schools about the implementation of version 2 of the prototypical plurilingual whole school policy at their schools; to be used by other schools in aid of their own plurilingual projects and by decision makers in aid of including plurilingual approaches in school policy. The work towards these outputs will also entail a change in the individual partner schools’ structure, i.e. new plurilingual courses will be established, teachers will train in plurilingual teaching, teachers’ meetings across languages will be established etc.2) Results from evaluating version 2 of the plurilingual whole school policy, including new approaches containing objectives, content and assessment tools of plurilingual language teaching in order to present models for best practice in plurilingual education, will be made available to teachers and school management, as well as to educational politics and multilingualism researchers. This will help spread the idea of the policy and facilitate its implementation in other schools and educational institutions.3) Research results on students’ language attitudes and their experiences in plurilingual classes – specifically in a multilingual theatre group and in classes on Germanic intercomprehension – will be produced and published, to be used in multilingualism research as well as for decision-making in school management, school policy and educational politics.4) Recommendations on school development and to decision makers in secondary school education about best practice in the implementation of the plurilingual whole school policy will be produced based on the experiences in this project.5) Plur>E Online Modules for networking, expanding the number of future partners and the types of schools, sharing best practice examples with teachers across Europe.