Case Studies

Sierra Morena High School is located in the city of Andújar in a culturally and socio-economically middle to lower class neighborhood where a large percentage of the population is at a greater risk of exclusion in a social and academic context.
In this framework, the “World Language Week” project was created and supported by the whole Educational Community. During one week, the High School becomes a multicultural window by means of which students explain and illustrate the amazing world of 12 other languages and cultures to their friends and family.

• Equipping students with basic multicultural skills through carrying out tasks and activities related to different countries, emulating a “cultural dialogue” without leaving the centre, converting the foreign language class into an intermediary between the native culture and the foreign culture.
• Responding to the wide scope of diversity through making use of a large activity bank and flexible methodologies.
• Promoting group work as the basis around which rotate both the development of materials and the implementation and revision of materials.
• Promoting responsibility and autonomy in students in managing their own learning.
• Making effective use of new information technology, particularly during the period of research and theoretical training.
• Encouraging oral communication.

Students search in-depth from different areas of knowledge the most prominent issues of different cultures with one obvious objective: to abolish topics and reach a true intercultural dialogue using knowledge of distant and unknown cultural situations.
The undeniable ability of this project to reform and develop knowledge makes it even more motivational for the educational community as a whole, recognizing its great educational merit and its democratic and universal values.

• Data from evaluations of successive editions of "Language Week" show that learning through completing projects is more productive than conventional, more theoretical methods.
• Group work strengthens the student's learning process, fosters personal relationships with the rest of the group and increases their self-esteem.
• Attention to diversity has achieved involving the most unmotivated students, who have seen the use of other less "academic" skills as beneficial to the student and the group.

By competing for the award, the coordinators, aimed to demonstrate that from a little village, in southern Spain, and by extension, from any educational community in the world, it is possible to enhance the catalogue of good practice to be implemented around Europe.

The project has been disseminate via www.ies-sierramorena.es

The award has shown that it is possible to celebrate the world languages and cultures through a commitment for a shared equal unprejudiced education that conveys the knowledge of the human phenomenon in all its scope, as a prevention tool against intolerance, racism and violence rooted in the fear of the unknown.

To keep working for a better world from a collaborative and interdisciplinary perspective.
To be aware of Europe´s good practices shown in the European program´s webs to continue learning from others excellent projects.

This project offers enhancement of quality of language teaching
It also promotes new approaches to language teaching and learning (e.g. CLIL, use of ICT etc), together with promotion of multilingualism.

By means of showing different languages and its cultures, this project underlines the important contribution of intercultural dialogue to enhance the world. It serves as a reference to demonstrate the interrelation of language skills on the one hand and mutual understanding and valuing cultures on the other hand.