Pisa – CHoC – Erasmus+, a teacher perspective

 

The fine students and staff at Ulisse Dini in Pisa, went above and beyond what was expected in the science element of the project. The experiments that they carried out were extremely detailed, well thought out and fascinating. What made it even more impressive was that the students were extremely comfortable in their lab environment and extremely capable of explaining the complex nature of their experiments to students who have far less experience in the science lab. What more, they did so in English and such that everything was crystal clear. Our hats off to them.

During the week of work there was many surprising elements. The skits/scenes that students had to create for the last day seemed haphazard and not serious when we saw the work the kids were doing on them. To our utter amazement, they created scenes that tied up all the loose ends, that put into perspective all that was learned over the course of the time spent together. This was possible because of the vision the organizers had of what to do and the vast amounts of work put into it with their own students well before all us international partners arrived.

In addition to the excellent scientific work our hosts went out of their way to bring wonderful cultural experiences to us, guided tours of Pisa, trips to national parks, visits from the vice-mayor (!), short presentation on Keith Haring in front of a mural he did in Pisa and an amazing presentation by a master chocolatier.

This was the first time for our hosts to put on a project, there were growing pains, there were hiccups in the organization but, the end result does indeed show us that they know what they want to do and they know what is expected of each partner in an Erasmus+ project.

I can only hope that they use this experience as a base to carry on with Erasmus+ work and future projects!