CHoC Mobility at Poli

CHoC at Poli, hosting an Erasmus+ mobility

Though the official program was from May 16 to May 20, 2022 we cannot let the weekends leading to and following the event out. Why would we include the weekends you may ask? Well, we learned a lot from our Belgian partners are Sintjans College, Ghent. They hosted an informal get together for the teachers and students. Letting the teachers hang out, talk about their lives outside of the project, have dinner together resulted. We included the students in the dinner as well. The effect on commoradery was immediately obvious at the opening ceremony on Monday morning. The participants acted as peers from the opening to the closing on Friday.

The entire week, from the opening words by school principal Pintér Zsolt to the closing remarks by Rob Dawson, from the incredibly informative sessions at Kocka Csóki to the workshops as part of the Poli Good Practice on to scavenger hunts round town learning about the history of cacao/chocolate in Hungary participants were on equal footing. There were differences in language skills and interpersonal skills, however, these did not impede communication and cooperation. The level of openness could never have been this high without the informal dinner and sports afternoon/evening on Sunday.

The kindness, caring and openness of participating teachers from all partner schools was also a seminal element throughout the entire project and even more so here at the Budapest meeting. Cultural differences appeared in culinary arts, for example. However, leading by doing, discussing openly the concept of grizes tészta helped participant students better understand why it is eaten here. This led to other discussions about various dishes in partner countries that seem normal to the locals and strange to the visitors. Lángos, a savory dish here, was liked by all participants, however, at first glance, they expected a sweet dish. Again, great discussions ensued about various cultural aspects from all partner countries (and frankly speaking, new project ideas came up as well).

Students lead most of the workshops of our Good Practice with teachers participating as facilitators. Peer-to-peer teaching, both in the school and in town on scavenger hunts using innovative digital maps and routing resulted in our participants feeling the project was theirs due to putting so much work into preparing, from providing ideas/modifications to working with their peers from partner schools when running the event. Participants from partners schools were very excited to see their peers leading workshops rather than teachers. Partner teachers were impressed with the level of work carried out by our students.

Our teacher designed and run, formal education based Good Practice was transformed into a non-formal, peer-to-peer event by the hard work of our participants. Hats off to them! Their hard work also contributed greatly to the over all success of the meeting. All participants interpersonal skills, language and communication skills, ICT skills improved, their knowledge of Europe and Europeanness also improved.