Multiplier Event in Greece - Democracy in Transition - Skills for a Better Society
06 June 2023
Multiplier Event in Greece – Democracy in Transition – Skills for a Better Society
- When: 7 th July 2023
- Place: Heliotrope Hotel, Mytilene, Greece
- Registration: Free and Open // Please register for the event HERE
- Special Guest Speaker: Professor Emerita Marcie Boucouvalas, Virginia Tech, United States of America (Photo)
- Workshop Title: “Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Looking Backward, Looking Forward: A call to awareness, action, advocacy, and inquiry for ICT”
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May 23rd Meeting in Vienna
23 May 2023
Hard to believe, our project is in the home stretch! Soon we will have completed all the promised activities on empathy-emotional learning. On May 23rd, all partner countries met in Vienna face-to-face to discuss the next steps towards finalisation. We are very proud of our work done so far, some products will be validated within the next weeks and then our focus will be on exploitation. With great pleasure we like to anchor our results in the pedagogical field in the longer term.
May 22nd Multiplier-Event at University college in Vienna Conference on “Democracy in change”
22 May 2023
On May 22nd 2023, the international multiplier seminar took place in Vienna (AT) with over 80 visitors. In the context of the conference “Democracy in Change – Skills for a Better Society”, the European Heart Project was successfully presented to interested educators.
Two more national multiplier seminars will take place in summer in Reunion and Greece, where the results of the European Heart Project will be presented to the public.
28 April 2023 Module guide for teachers and training platform online
28 April 2023
The Guide for Teachers provides a description of all European Heart materials and how they can be used in the classroom. Included are a section on democratic values in school culture and real-world examples of the many applications of European Heart products in schools. This guide is available for download on our project website.
Our training platform (https://training.european-heart.eu/) contains all our results in a virtual learning environment. Interested persons, students, teachers, school administrators and representatives of extracurricular youth institutions, will find in this online environment a variety of materials around the topics of basic needs, empathy and democracy.
03 October 2022- The 4th newsletter has been sent out
03 October 2022
In autumn 2022, we will work on the feedback to the videos (IO2), while the preparations for the next steps and products continue: We are developing the ACT Game (IO3) and the Module Guide for Teachers (IO4). IO4 shows teachers how to use the materials (brochures, app, videos and ACT game) in different didactic settings.
The ACT Game (Active Citizen Team Game) is an interactive team board game with digital extensions for pupils in EN, DE, FR and GR, which aims to promote social and intercultural competences, critical thinking, understanding of the EU’s common values, and civic engagement and participation among young people in a fun way.
For this purpose, there will be a f2f meeting of the partnership in Athens (GR) at the end of November 2022.
7-9 July 2022 - Rhodes - Partner meeting and presentations
10 July 2022
The project’s transnational partner meeting and several joint outreach activities took place at the ICICTE 2022 Conference in Rhodes, Greece.
In early July, all partners met on the Greek island and worked diligently on the progress of the EU Heart project. In the course of this, we presented our project in a poster presentation to the international guests. Our project coordinator Klaus Linde-Leimer was able to give a more detailed account of the ideas and materials of the project to the international community in a roundtable. (ICICTE 2022: http://icicte.org/2022-programme.html)
Video production in "The European Heart Project" in the IgelTV studio (Graz-Austria)
8 May 2022
After months of preparation, from May 2nd to 6th 2022, the training week with the video production on historical episodes in the context of human rights and democracy was successfully implemented at the PH Styria. Numerous guests from four schools took part in the training week in “The European Heart Project” at the University College of Teacher Education in Graz: Six people from Greece, six people from La Reunion (FR) and seven guests from the Kolibri School (from Welten in Burgenland) were welcomed by teachers and students from PMS in Graz.
During the training week, the short films were recorded in the respective national language as well as in the project language English in the film studio of IgelTV. Furthermore, intercultural exchange, a city tour on human rights and democracy, a block on the critical use of social media as well as the work on the next product (an interactive game) were on the agenda during this week.
The sweet side of democracy
6 May 2022
The chocolate manufacturer Zotter demonstrates how a company can act fairly and responsibly. To take a closer look, we set off from Graz to south-eastern Styria on the last day of our joint training. The day before, the 17 students from Austria, Greece and La Reunion together prepared questions to ask Josef Zotter about his corporate culture and how he implements important values of democracy in his company.
You can listen to the interview in this podcast: https://radioigel.at/zotter-chocolate/
The preparatory work for filming the episodes is almost complete
28 March 2022
By now the following working materials are already available on our project website: Brochures on the 5 basic needs and strategies to fulfil them, as well as descriptions of selected historical episodes. The students have been working on historical episodes and trying to understand the characters acting at that time with empathy. Afterwards, artistic puppets were made for the historical personal stories, the text scripts were created and practised.
In May 2022, the students in Graz will shoot their videos with their puppets. At the end of March 2022, we were able to send out the third newsletter to people, institutions and stakeholders interested in the project.
The second Newsletter has been sent out
30 September 2021
In autumn, workshops are being implemented in the schools with the help of the materials available in the manuals. On the one hand, the students learn about Glasser’s basic needs, and on the other hand, they learn to distinguish between constructive strategies for satisfying their own basic needs and destructive ones in order to find solutions that serve themselves and the common good.
Back in the partner countries after the stay in Graz, the teachers work with their students to develop scripts for selected historical episodes and to build and artistically design the puppets for the video production. The meeting in Austria planned for February 2022 had to be postponed to May 2022 due to the pandemic.
First face-to-face meeting at the PH Styria (Austria)
30 September 2021 
In our research cooperation, the first face-to-face meeting of the research partners of the participating institutions from the three countries (Greece, France-Reunion, Austria) took place in Graz at the University of Teacher Education from 22nd to 24th September 2021 after numerous online meetings.
The first day was dedicated to the evaluation and planning of the next steps by the project managers, the following two days were dedicated to trainings for the participating teachers. These workshops on script writing and puppet creating prepared the participants for their work in fall with the students in school. In February 2022, pupils from the partners countries will come to the RadioIgel studio in Graz and record their films (in countries´ language and English language).
The first newsletter is ready and has been sent out in Europe
30 April 2021
In spring we worked very diligently and consequently on the concept of Basic Needs (William Glasser) and different strategies to fulfil them. This emotional-empathic approach assumes that all people have the same basic needs. In doing so, students learn to develop an empathic relationship with themselves and others and thus acquire a critical distance from emotionalising rhetoric. The result in form of the first two brochures of the project was revised and refined with numerous experts and teachers of students aged between 13 and 16 year in several European countries. At the end of April 2021, we were able to send out the first newsletter to people, institutions and stakeholders interested in the project.
Successful project launch in the EU Heart Partnership
30 December 2020
In the European Heart Project, four institutions of the countries of Austria, Greece and Reunion (France) are working together in order to create teaching materials and media for history, politics and ethics lessons based on an emotional-empathic approach. The project started in autumn 2020. At the beginning, organisational work (responsibilities, timetables, budget, website, etc.) was implemented in several online meetings. Now the flyer for the project with basic information has already been completed, which provides a good overview of all the planned ressources and results in the project till the end in Summer 2023.
