From March 28th to 31st, the first international project meeting will be held in France, at Briqueterie and Lycée International in Saint Germain-en-Laye.
An opportunity for all the partners to meet and exchange ideas, marking the concrete start of their work in the field, involving operators, teachers and artists that together will tackle the different themes and working tools with a view to educational innovation for the entire school community.
The aim of this meeting is to co-construct the direction and the development of the project with the partners, through a series of in-depth discussions focused on the Media Dance + assumptions: the value of performance in schools, innovation in school settings, the projects of the artists who will animate the activities in the field and the visit to the partnered sites of the project (Briqueterie and Lycée Saint Germain-en-Laye).
In addition to these, there will be brainstorming sessions, group activation and working tables aimed at the co-design and development of the workshop themes, networking actions with subjects participating in other Erasmus+ projects hosted by Lycée in those same days, and round tables on international exchanges chaired by the Director of the Erasmus Programme. 

Participants in the meeting:

The experimentation action envisaged by the Media Dance + project takes place in different scholastic and geographical contexts, Italy and France, more specifically “Liceo Classico Alfieri” in Turin and “Lycée International” in Saint Germain-en-Laye. 

The aim is to test a new approach to teaching Citizenship Education in Italy and a new curricular subject called “Connaissances du monde” (knowledge of the world) in France. Although the methods of construction and development of the project are different, the approach at the basis of the process of didactic innovation is the same: proposing an artist’s residence to investigate contemporary themes together with students and teachers through the language and assumptions of performing art with the aim to draw up an interdisciplinary didactic plan of Citizenship Education or this new subject called “Connaissances du monde”.

The project intends to encourage high school students to increase their civic participation by means of a process involving artistic approach, activation, residency, and rendition guided by a social/current theme. The artist’s residency aims to raise social and participatory awareness and artistic sensitivity that will foster the artistic expression of one’s own ideas and the ability to read art, in this case, dance.

Dissemination and follow-up activities are crucial to ensure that the project will not be an end in itself. Media Dance + aims to reach out to other schools and teachers, seeking to generate interest in the language of performance used in schools to speak to students in a different way.
Each partner will develop an event format based on its target audience. On the one hand, the dissemination activity will ultimately address the stakeholders, namely the European high schools – i.e. the bodies that can implement future projects concerning this methodology – and the teachers, i.e. those professionals who need to acquire new skills to embrace and promote the educational principles of the project. On the other hand, it will target the reference communities of the two schools involved, in order to extend the benefits of participation to students and families not directly involved. Finally, a further target group for this activity consists of partner institutions, as they themselves will benefit from the analysis of the possibilities of obtaining new funding and promoting other similar projects.