WINDROSE FESTIVAL KA229 – School Exchange Partnerships
This Erasmus+ school exchange partnership is the result of a cooperation that has started in 2019 between ART’J, performing arts school from Portugal (Branca) and its three school partners: Liceo musicale A. Passaglia from the city of Lucca in Italy as well as Georg Otsa Tallinn Music College from Estonia (Tallinn) and Kainuu Vocational College from Finland (Kajaani). As it was initially planned, this project intends to share good practices between the schools in order to respond to the need of preparing better the students for their integration into a professional context that is increasingly more globalised and competitive in the cultural and creative economy.
Therefore, came the idea of organising a performing arts festival called “Wind Rose Festival: finding our way through the arts”. This project has gained more significance in a moment where Europe and the entire world are confronted with the dramatic effects of the covid-19 pandemic as it aims at supporting cooperation in education and training in particular, in the field of arts very much hit by this crisis.
The image of the wind rose has been chosen as it displays the orientation for following a route and reaching the destination. This partnership has been created based precisely on this meaning: to inspire the students from different schools, courses and contexts by gathering them around a common goal and project of organising an international festival. The wind rose with its multiple points reflects the great variety that can be found amongst the creative and artistic areas that are taught within the partner schools and represented in this project altogether: music, dance, theatre, visual arts, scenography and multimedia as well as music production and technologies, media, marketing and music business.
The partnership will cover the 2020/21 and 2021/22 school years and will start with a joint staff training event gosted by the partner school in Tallinn, in December 2020. School staff in charge of implementing the project will gather for an eTwinning training, working sessions on music business and event productions in order to develop their skills by exchanging good practices and learning from each other through collaboration.
This will also be the kick-off meeting of the project from which all activities will begin.
The Wind Rose festival will be presented in three countries: the premiere in Portugal, in May 2021; The second edition in Finland, in December 2021 and the closing festival in Italy, in September 2022. In between the festivals, a selected number of students will work in international teams under the guidance of their teachers and their common tasks will have to design, prepare and produce the festival as a live event gathering the performing arts on a same stage. These activities will be carried out virtually through the eTwinning platform and physically, during the successive short-term exchanges of students to take place bilaterally in the countries of the school partners: first round of students exchange in March 2021, the second round in September 2021 and the last one in April 2022. A total of 80 students will be actively participating in nine short term exchanges. For each edition of the festival, more students from the hosting schools will be selected for performing at the event.
This project aims at providing students with learning opportunities for enhancing their competences not only on their course area by updating methods and perspectives. They will be able to explore fields that are essential for their professional career such as entrepreneurship, critical thinking, creativity and collaborative work as well as the sense of self-initiative, organisation and decision-making. Students will also gain new insight on music business. A higher command of the english language and a better understanding of different cultural contexts will be other expected results of the students having taken part in exchange activities.
On what concern the schools, such partnership will support their modernisation process, their quality of teaching and learning and their attractiveness. Schools will be more international by consolidating the existing cooperation and being opened to future projects of such dimension. This will also enhance their international projection and their connections with stakeholders in the field of culture and arts as well as in the creative industry and music business.
This Wind Rose Festival will be the chance for those students from Estonia, Finland, Italy and Portugal to demonstrate that they are capable of creating altogether events of such dimension through dialogue with values and attitudes of respect and non-discrimination by finding their way of being the future citizens of Europe through the arts.
