Elementary school Branko Radicevic Serbia
|
Located in Bujanovac, in the far south of Serbia, this is one of the largest schools in the region that roughly numbers 1200 pupils and 92 teachers. The students’ age ranges from 7 to 15.The school system is organized within 8 levels. The studies include mother tongue and mathematics, science, social sciences (history, civic education), foreign languages (English, French, Russian) and art.
Motivation of our school to enter the project comes from a tendency towards improvement of students’ competitiveness thus strengthening their language and intercultural skills, encouraging international partnership and cooperation during their regular school activities as a positive motivation, throughout practical and open approach towards learning. During the “After school clubs” project, our students could develop more motivation for learning and more self-esteem in socializing, due to the opportunity of presenting their own knowledge and sharing their experience with their EU peers throughout their creativity. Moreover, including our pupils into the project would change their attitude towards school. Once a one two dimensional, boring black and white picture of it, where everything is still would get its third dimension, more tangible one, dynamic, with far more interesting and more attractive things to learn and do. As a teachers, we are interested in direct learning, developing intercultural and language skills; we would like to share our experience acquired from the unique professional surrounding with the other colleagues and pupils we teach. Our aim is encouraging cultural diversity. Project leaders would be young and perspective teachers who highly appreciate the European values. The project manager is Ms Marija Stojkovic, an English teacher, and Mr Sladjan Kitanovic, a math teacher. We already have experience in participating and cooperating in many school projects. Our school is a very good partner for many reasons. It is a multiethnic and multicultural school and as such, it is open for the cooperation and for sharing the experience with other cultures and nations. I would like to mention a very successful three-year cooperation project with schools in Norway, as well as a similar Erasmus + project (MOTIVATION III – 21ST CENTURY STUDENTS) which was recently successfully completed. There is also a peer mediation team at our school. We participated in number of projects on developing multicultural values and eliminating the differences because the school is operating in a multi ethnic environment burdened with the political situation. I would also like to point out that all the teachers were involved throughout these projects and, we are very active in taking in and including children from the war zones in the Near and Middle East in our school system. |