The Project's Initial Meeting at EOI Cornellà

Just a few hours seem to have passed since yesterday night’s goodbyes and we are all back at the school for the first of the project meetings.

No one at EOI Cornellà wanted to miss this occasion, so all the school staff was there. Our Grundtvig teacher assistants from France and Poland have also taken part in it, and the four trainee teachers doing their practicum with us have willingly accepted the invitation to participate as well.

The clock strikes 10 a.m. and Oriol Pallarés, the principal at EOI Cornellà, opens the COMMUNITEK – Melting Distances initial meeting and goes on to introduce all the attendees: France Lathouwers and Stéphanie Close from the Centre d’Orientation et de Formation in Amay, Belgium; Tiina Kangas-Bryan from the Lapuan Kansalaisopisto in Lapua, Finland; Niki Koutalianou and Panagiota Bourtsoukli from the IT Academy Panagiota Bourtsoukli in Tripoli, Greece; Marta Márquez from the University of Chester in the UK – who this time joins us via Skype – and Laura Borràs, Eulàlia Vilaginés, Marc Julià, Daniel Lopez, Karen Carty, José Manuel Fernández, Carolina García, Aleksandra Tymczewska, Jessica Alborghetti and Elena Duvent as the ‘home team.’

Important aspects regarding how the different project tasks will be carried out and which institution will be responsible for each of them over the following two years are agreed upon, as is the assessment procedure to be followed. The ICT tools that will be created and used throughout the project are also introduced ­­– such as the project blog, YouTube channel and website.

The next mobilities to each of the different participating institutions are discussed and planned too, yet the precise dates for the more distant ones are still to be confirmed.

To help everyone through this four-hour meeting, one of our French students has kindly home-baked a tray of tasty treats for us – for which we thank him very much!

And speaking of eating, at 2 p.m. the meeting is closed and all the attendees are invited to lunch at a nearby restaurant school, where secondary school dropouts in training have another opportunity to explore their talents and sense of worth outside regular education – they have even let us peek into the kitchen!

After a couple of hours of getting to know each other a bit better and talking about everyone’s expectations regarding the project, the time to say goodbye – or rather see you soon – finally comes. Next stop: Amay, April 24^th.