FESTIVALS AND TRADITIONS

Un résumé en français si vous préférez!

History of the project:

We first undertook out timeline project under the auspices of the European Commission (DGIII, ESPRIT). The Web for Schools project started on March 1st '96 and ended on November 30th '96 with the aim of contributing to the Information Society by preparing the ground for a concerted effort to establish a community of teachers from a set of 150 selected pilot schools all over Europe.
These teachers should eventually be able, in terms of skills and infrastructure, to use and contribute to a network of people involved in the production of electronic educational material.
The Web for Schools team organized 28 training sessions in 9 different countries for teachers who had next to no experience at all.

The project was presented at the Web for Schools Conference in Dublin in October '96, at the EITC '96 in Brussels in November '96 and at the Openclassroom II Conference in Crete in September '97. The team was present in Brussels during the Netd@ys Europe week in October '97, and it also organised IRC chats and exhibitions in the different partnerschools during Netd@ys 1998.

The project been accepted by the German, Scottish, Spanish and French Socrates agencies and is a Comenius project with four partner schools (the project's first preparatory visit took place in Barcelona in February '97).

"Festivals and Traditions" is also an EUN, I*EARN and Schule ans Netz project.

An article was written in the French newspaper "Le Monde" (special multimedia issue, May'97) about our project, several articles were written about Festivals in Context Magazine, and also our project was refered to several times in the German press as well as in a New Zealand National newspaper.

Festivals and Traditions...Why such topic ?

Our initial team (Brigitte Parry, Reiner Forster and Pat Spiller) met in Brussels during one training session and felt that such a topic was really worth it because it had great potential and it concerned each one of us within the European Union.
Pupils and teachers could all help to collect together information about local festivals, traditions and celebrations, as well as to outline briefly the main celebrations held nationally.
This theme appeared to be cross-curricular too, as it involves documents studied in History, Geography, Economics, Home economics, Languages, Literature...etc. It was friendly enough and flexible enough to trigger off fancy creative writing exercises, mini reports, photography training, family talks and a collective reflection on archetypal customs. It was a way to ally past and future, local identity and European citizenship, grandparents' memories and New Technologies, native languages alongside English as today's vehicle language.

What happened after Brussels?

The Web for Schools team provided us with an initial wealth of advice, financial, technical and... psychological support. They all truly made it possible for us to start off the project and thanks to them and our enthusiasm, we set off on our Internet educational adventure.
Email enabled us to keep in permanent touch with each other and a special Web for Schools mailing list helped us to contact schools all over Europe.
File Tranfer Protocol facilities were at our disposal, so any data can be sent to us easily, downloaded for programming, then transfered to the World Wide Web.
Web for Schools has now become part of the European Schools Network (EUN.org) and is one of their example schools projects.

A European Schools Network:

France: Three schools: Montbrison, Toulouse, Le Mans.
Spain: Two schools: Barcelona, Pamplona
Germany: One school: Munich
Scotland: One school: St. Patrick's Primary School

The following work has been done so far by the four partner schools:
Regional research, photographs, reports, linguistic adaptation of the documents, selection of literary texts, historical and cultural studies, traditional sports reports, artistic studies, creative writing, HTML programming, web links and tree structure, dealing with electronic pictures, organising exhibitions and training sessions in our schools...etc.
Other European schools in Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, and Sweden have expressed their wish to contribute to our site, and so their pupils have also had an opportunity to tell other youngsters in Europe and elsewhere about their favourite celebrations and parties!
Austria: One school: Schladming.
data on national festivals
Belgium: Two schools contributed:
Research, texts and personal stories, superstitions.
Finland: One school: Espoo
Home economics for traditional Finnish recipes and a selection of texts written by the pupils
Greece: one school (Patras)
Information about local festivals (in Greek and English)
Hungary: One school: Interesting local festivals from the town of Baja
Iceland: One school: Some very nice information about Christmas celebrations in Iceland
Italy : One school for the present, but there is another school preparing information
Traditions, Festivals, Italian cooking...
Netherlands: One school: Bussum, the latest addition to our site, with lots of information (mainly in Dutch for the moment)
Portugal: Two schools: Soure, Sintra.
Religious and seasonal festivals, poems, photos and programming.
Sweden: Two schools: Haninge, Taby.
A Swedish seasonal study and poems in Swedish and English
United Kingdom: A brief resumé of the main traditions

Several schools and researchers have contacted us for information and the eventual possibility to use our documents in class.
We have also had several Worldwide contributors to our site:
Argentina: Several texts about local and National celebrations
China: Beijing, texts about a few of the Chinese festivals.
Ghana: Information about a local festival celebrated in Accra
Martinique: Some lovely texts about cooking and customs
New Zealand:Waikato University Language Institute.
Texts and pictures about "Kiwi Festivals" and also a text about Maori traditions.

At the moment, students from Bulgaria, Denmark, FYROM, Ireland, Romania, Slovakia and Ukraine are beginning to work on our topic too.
A French Catering school will soon get some French festive recipes together.

All in all, 21 European schools from 15 different European countries have already contributed to our site so far and more schools are planning to join in the future.

We have contributions from 5 non-European countries, with more to come...

Schools and Educational establishments taking part in our project
We regularly reply to emails from all over the world (the USA, Europe, Africa) about European Traditions, we make a point of giving authentic and lively information.

Our collaboration is friendly and rooted in a few so-called rules:

the work has to be done in schools by pupils and teachers.
it has to be in two languages if possible (native and English).
the layout has to be approved of by the four main partners (Pat Spiller is responsible for contents)

Within the main structure we have the following support available:

Brigitte Parry deals with Contacts with international organizations and overall information.
Pat Spiller deals with the Contents and the Index and special arrangements for special traditions
Reinhard Forster provides our partners and partners -to-be with Technical tips and aid.

In all the schools concerned, teams of pupils and teachers have been sharing their skills, Internet clubs have being "sprouting" here and there and we have achieved what seemed to be an impossible challenge at first: hundred of pupils are motivated, they create, communicate and feel they can be part of the Information Society. The German partners have edited a CD ROM about our site, which is regularly updated, and copies are sent to all schools contributing to the project.

The future of our site:

A Comenius project dealing with the 15 countries of the Union and their traditions.
We are working on a more inter-active site (the German partner school, Kurt Huber Grammar School have designed a pilot "quiz" game, which is also being developed by the Spanish team Spanish quiz)
We would like to take our training a little further so our site includes sound and video.
As far as languages are concerned, it appears to be essential to preserve the participants' native languages as well as offer an English version of their festivals.
We would be happy to expand the scope of our work to the rest of the world
We can help teachers work on our topic by providing online teaching material.

Our site will expand according to the demands made by others, the interest shown by staff and pupils in the partner schools and to the financial support it can manage to find to pay for the enormous costs involved (the internet connections are not cheap, the computers and software need to be found, the team of partners need to meet at least twice a year to discuss new ideas, methods, etc)
We are a small team of partners, all teachers working full-time, and trying to involve and stimulate students in a project designed to prepare them for the future. We know many schools are working under poor ICT conditions (two of our schools have only one computer for the project), but a lot can be achieved if the enthusiasm is there.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like our support in order to start your own project, or if you would like to start by contributing to our site......

To conclude, we may quote an email which was sent to us from Finland:
"During spring term we studied the texts concerning spring festivals in other European countries, the students studied different texts in small groups and then informed the other groups. They seemed to be very interested in learning about how different cultures can be."
...a good illustration of what our site is about..getting to know the others better so as to learn to respect them better.

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