For many years the European Union has been supporting educational institutions and projects within the programme called Socrates.

Comenius is the part of Socrates that supports different kinds of projects carried out by schools. The most common Comenius projects are language projects and school projects.

For a Comenius school project three or more schools of three or more European countries decide to work together on a certein topic for a duration of up to three years. During this time students and teachers of all participating school communicate on their project work via e-mail and internet; they also attend project meetings.

Faces of Europe

A personal approach to the 20th century

In November 2003 teachers of the participating schools discussed their ideas concerning a new Comenius school project and finally decided to start the project "Faces of Europe".

As a typical Comenius school project our project work will be spread over three school years, beginning in October 2004 and ending in July 2007. During these three years the students will deal with historical facts and personal experiences within (nearly) the whole 20th century.

We divided the 20th century into "generations": the work of the first year deals with the "grandparents' generation" (i. e. 30s - 50s), the second year with the "parents' generation" (60s - 80s) and the last year with the "students' generation" (90s - 00s).

In each project year the project work is divided into two main parts. From October to January students do a kind of historical research. In all the schools teachers choose six keywords, each representing a typical event in the school's country during the current generation. There is one keyword for each of the following topics: history, economy, culture, sciences, religion and geography. In this way there are 36 keywords for each generation and the students' task is to fond out what the keywords of the foreign countries and their own country are about. Doing this they learn a lot about the 20th century in different parts of Europe.

In the second half of each year the project work turns to the "faces". Based on the knowledge acquired during the research at the beginning of the year, students of all participating schools find and agree on common interview questions. They talk to people of their hometowns who were of the students' age during the generation dealt with. By these interviews and the comparison of the results of the six countries history comes to life.

Kaynak: http://www.faces-of-europe.net/