The project MARE – Motala and Reggio Emilia – has involved two upper secondary schools providing general education: Liceo Scientifico Aldo Moro, in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and Platengymnasiet, located in Motala on lake Vättern in Sweden. Both schools have, among others, a program in science. Both schools are currently seeking to renovate and rethink their teaching practice of scientific subjects in order to better meet the educational and cultural challenges of today’s world and to make the use of digital media a permanent feature of teaching and learning. Through the implementation of this project the students have been engaged in new forms of learning mode which hopefully have somehow sharpened their soft and hard skills and competences, spurred their motivation, developed their critical thinking skills and their sense of European belonging. Likewise the teachers have been able to discuss, investigate, share and enhance the teaching of scientific subjects , namely chemistry, biology, and physics. The project has been carried out in English, which has enhanced the language competence of both students and teachers. The project initial objectives were: 1. To provide students with transnational learning experiences that would improve their skills and competences in key subjects for their cultural and professional growth: experimental sciences (physics, chemistry, biology), English language, digital literacy. 2. To promote the students' ability to teamwork transnationally, with the specific aim to widen their cultural horizon by forming meaningful relationships and work collaborations with peers from another European country, thus building up European citizenship. 3. To enable teachers from two different educational backgrounds to compare and enrich their teaching practices in the scientific area, to improve their language skills in CLIL teaching (ENGLISH) , to consolidate and widen their digital literacy. The participants have been: for Italy a math/physics teacher, a biology/chemistry teacher, two teachers of English; for Sweden two math/physics teachers, one biology/chemistry teacher and one English/Italian teacher, one English teacher. Not all of them have been involved in year two and three.The first year the students involved were a class of 21 sixteen-year-old Italian kids and a class of 22 seventeen-year-old Swedish kids. The second year two new classes of Italian and Swedish students were chosen to participate but the onset of the Covid pandemic significantly altered the continuation of the project.In YEAR ONE the activities carried out were:transnational meetings for staff alone and students visiting the partner's country. The students attended mini-lessons and experiences of physics, chemistry, biology in their own schools and in the partner school when visiting, carried out tasks in groups with final production of outcomes and presentations, in collaboration with the partner peers. They met virtually through the Internet and in person to carry out the planned activities. There were also field trips and the meaningful experience of sharing one another's home since the students were hosted by the students' families. The teachers of the two schools have always planned the activities together, organized and managed the students' activities, supervised the students' groupwork and transnational cooperation, they met the partner school's colleagues twice the first year for the parts of the project to be done in presence with the students, and once a year for a preparation meeting at the beginning of each school year.In YEAR TWO and THREE it has not been possible to carry out the same activities as planned, on account of the Covid pandemic. Objectives were redesigned to meet the restrictions to travel and the pressures on both teachers and students to conduct their teaching and learning in remote schooling. We had to accommodate all the difficulties of the new situation, also taking into account the fact that Italy and Sweden responded to the pandemic in different ways at different times, so it was virtually impossible to implement activities following the initial plan. However, the teachers were able to jointly decide on a new course of action. Namely they agreed to reproduce the same laboratory experiences as in year one, whenever this would be possible, and to exchange teaching ideas and practices to be delivered to the students when in remote schooling. So they could do hands-on experiences even in their own homes, film them, discuss them, in other words investigate the topics of study through home-based experiences. The students in year two and three have not been able to travel, nor have they developed transnational group activities through the Internet. Actually an attempt to do so was made at the beginning of the first Italian lockdown in March 2020, but it immediately became apparent that there were other priorities to meet and it just couldn't work.Certainly the second year of the project and the third year (extension) have been very different from the first one, but not useless. Far from it. We believe that, given the situation, goals have been achieved, collaboration between partners has survived and thrived, the objectives of the project overall have been met, though admittedly to a lesser extent. Even considering the changes due to the pandemic, the overall impact of the project has been:- improved teaching methodology connected to the scientific area, -new practices and strategies exchanged, transferred and implemented. The results on the stakeholders have been: -Students’ improved knowledge and skills of physics, biology, chemistry and English. -Teachers’ improved teaching skills, improved language skills (English) and increased awareness of new teaching methods. -Teachers’ and students’ improved teamwork skills, increased internationalization of the schools and enhanced European citizenship -Teachers’ and students’ production of new didactic materials in the subjects at the core of the project (such as presentations, reports, data collection and analysis, on-line materials) to be shared both in presence and remotely.. -Teachers’ and students’ increased skills in the use of digital tools, -Increased involvement of families with school life (only for year one students) In the longer term the innovations in teaching method will spill over the whole schools through dissemination activities, such as the meeting we have just had at our Italian school to present all our Erasmus activities to the new teachers and to all the school. During the past two years it has been very difficult to share information when most of the time we have been working from home, or under very great pressures and unfavourable circumstances. The teaching practices exchanged will become a permanent feature of the school because the teachers involved have shared and are going to share them in their respective departments. The teachers' enthusiasm for the experience they've had will spill over new teachers too and yield results as well.

"Our two secondary schools, in Sweden and Italy, have earlier successfully worked together on an Erasmus project on the topic of Energy (2018-2020). We have found our first collaboration a source of precious learning and professional stimuli and have decided that there were the ideal conditions to embark on a new challenge, indeed a bigger one, that would try to respond to the urgent need and demand for wide-scope, good, deep, scientifically sound and technically informative education on the topic of Environmental issues and Climate Changes. To work with ENVIRONMENTAL AND CLIMATE CHANGES is a common goal, but we have different conditions in Sweden and Italy; environmental, cultural, economic and political. The EU policies concerning climate changes are the same for both countries, but national curriculum and schools deal with the issue in different ways. This project will increase a sense of solidarity and shared responsibility. It is important for students to have scientific knowledge and international understanding of the issue to gain greater freedom of democratic action - what to do as an individual, as part of a national and an international society, as a representative and elected politician or as an activist.This project´s objectives are -to give students scientific knowledge and an international perspective on the topic of Environment and climate changes, so they can actively be a part of a positive development of this topic. -to give the teachers opportunities to cooperate in their schools and between countries, to make the implementation of this topic in our schools in a sustainable plan.The projects activities will be digital meetings between teacher (also in real life if budget allows us) and four short-term exchanges for students. We will have preparation meetings between teachers with different subjects; Physics/Mathematics, Biology/Chemistry, English, History and Social studies. In our preparation we will also have one representative from Motala municipality, official working as an Environmental strategist, and this will give us a lot of opportunities to adapt the content of the project to current and local environmental problems and also disseminate the results of the project.Together we will work out multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary teaching about the topic Climate changes. The project is innovative for our schools because it focuses on ICT learning, English practice in other subject and involves students and teachers to create new methodology in education. Throughout the projec teachers will continuously plan, implement and evaluate common lessons and the exchanges of students in each other’s countries. We will have the project on two school years, to be able to adjust the experience and to enhance/enrich its scope, amend it if necessary, after the first year; and to offer the possibility to participate to a larger number of students by involving two classes in two subsequent years. Every year both schools will have at least 18 students which will take part in the project. Totally 72 students will actively take part in this two-year project. Both the Swedish and Italian schools will have students from Science programs. Students from the Swedish school are doing their second year and they are 17 - 18 years old. We have chosen a class were some of the students have the NANA branch with lots of science and some of the students have the NASA branch with a little more social science. Students from Italian school are doing their second year and they are 16 - 17 years old. Our common lessons and students exchanges will give students scientific knowledge, from both natural and social sciences, about climate changes. Students will use this scientific knowledge to ICT; discuss, debate, write scientific and political posts, everything in English. As one of the methodologies with this aim the students will act in a roleplay. The roleplay will have different roles; “climate skeptical”, “scientist”, “politicians” and ""activists"". All communication will be in English. We will invite other students and teachers, media, politicians and NGO to be audience.This project will share international common values, give civic engagement and actively participation in such a very important topic as Climate changes is. Our schools will develop, together with students, multidisciplinary and interactive teaching with digital tools/ICT, that will be implemented in cross-curriculum in a sustainable plan."

The context in which this project originates is deeply connected to the efforts of the EU for the development of a European Education Area by 2025 where spending time abroad to study and learn should become the norm. The project starts off from the need to promote a fundamentally new approach towards transnational mobility opportunities for upper secondary school students in which the school plays a more active role in driving the process while offering high quality learning experiences and ensuring recognition of the period(s) spent abroad. Upper secondary schools can in fact play a key role in educating the European citizens of the future by providing a transnational educational path equipping them with skills and competences needed to access the tertiary education of the future such as the European Universities.In the light of the above mentioned needs the General Objective of the project is to actively contribute to the construction of the European Education Area through the development of a model of European exchange and study programme among general upper secondary schools. The Specific Objectives of the project are:1)To develop and test a joint transnational curriculum/programme among the involved schools; 2)To identify a set of common assessment and certification methods tailored to the acquired competences and skills; 3) To build organisational capacity in upper secondary schools through the identification and the solution of administrative/management problems pertaining long term transnational mobility of pupils.The partnership consists of three upper secondary schools from four countries (Italy, Spain and Sweden) , a transnational network of local and regional authorities with an extensive experience in fostering transnational cooperation processes among educational actors and a research centre from Cyprus with one of the top experience in the field of education of the Mediterranean Region. The target groups of the project Teachers, Administrative and Management staff, 16-17 years old students (grade10-11), civil servants and policy makers in the field of education.The project will consists in a set of 6 transnational coordination meetings, two training seminars for teachers and two long-term mobility of students during which the Model will be tested.The model that will be developed by the partnership will be producing four main Intellectual Outputs which will be the core results of this 36-month-long project:IO1: A transnational study plan is produced based on a common set of subjects and shared contents in each disciplineIO2: A set of tools are produced for the assessment of the skills and notion acquiredIO3: An Administrative and Organisational Package to manage the ProgrammeIO4: An online training course for the school staff