The project responds to the current need to incorporate interdisciplinary learning in education to prepare high school and university students for real life and broaden their understanding of the world. It aims to provide teachers with learning materials with interdisciplinary content so that the teachers would not see time investment and lack of resources as major challenges and would have resources of high quality ready to be used by them.
Good management ensures the progress and quality of the project achievements.
The main objective of this Erasmus project is to design 4 coursebooks focused on the topics of Art & Culture, Literature, Civic Education and History. Each course book contains lesson plans and accompanying materials for 25 teaching units. By teaching the unit, we understand one standard lesson within the Slovak teaching system in a duration of 45 minutes. These coursebooks are intended as supplementary support for high school teachers, providing inspiration for their classes with clear step-by-step methodological instructions. Besides that, they promote interdisciplinarity as well as the concepts of inclusion and diversity. The course books are developed by collaborating with high school and university teachers with international backgrounds.
In the time of the project’s duration, the lesson plans created in work packages 2 and 4 will be continuously tested out in a series of online collaborative international lessons. These will be carried out in 3 stages. The first stage will last from September to December 2023 and include 2 COIL courses led by Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, and the University of Badji Mokhtar Annaba. The second stage will last from February to May 2024 and include 4 COIL courses led by Gymnázium Myjava, University of Badji Mokhtar Annaba, Universitatea Crestina Partium, and University of West Bohemia. The last, third stage will last from September to December 2024 and include 2 COIL courses led by Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra and Eszterhazy Karoly Katolikus Egyetem. The aim of the COILs is to try out the lesson plans in practice promoting international collaboration of university and high school students, evaluate their quality and appropriateness, and embellish them so that high school teachers using them in the future will get the maximum benefit from them.
In the time of the project’s duration, all lesson plans and independent activities will be continuously added to the virtual resource centre so that high school teachers can start using them even before the publication of the coursebooks at the end of the project. This resource corner will constitute an interactive intellectual hub where students and teachers will also be able to share their perspectives on interdisciplinary teaching, learning and specific perspectives on the topics of art & culture, literature, civic education and history, as well as their experience with trying the materials out in their classes, and thus help improve them.