The festival in Italy

We held our festival on the evening of 12 April 2018.

We had invited the families of our Erasmus student group, friends, classmates, teacher colleagues, the headmasters of the schools of our town and local political representatives (among them the mayors of Sterzing and the surrounding municipalities and the city council responsible for education and culture). A representative of the EURAC (European Academy) of Bozen as well as journalists from the local newspapers and the TV station RAI Sender Bozen were also present.

Our survey of the two-year-project started with a presentation of our partner schools and some facts about their language minorities. With photos and short films we also showed some funny moments and anectodes that had happened in the course of the two years.

Then our guests had the opportunity to have a closer look at our exhibition made up of various stalls where our students reported about their trips and gave further information about the countries they had visited.

At the buffet our guests could also taste various food specialities of the 6 minorities: Scottish Shortbread, Welsh Cakes, Polish Pierogis, Swiss Bizochels, Finnish Runebergtartor and Südtiroler Apfelstrudel. They could also take a recipe booklet home.

Our students made a tour around the exhibition with other classes during the lessons the following days. The exhibition can still be visited in the hall of our school until the end of the school year.

The media reported about our festival in two newspaper articles and a very nice TV report on RAI Sender Bozen.

Our guests were really impressed by the work and the outcome of our project. And with the festival our Erasmus group has again realized what they have achieved and what an enriching experience this project has been. We teachers are extremely proud of the work of our students!

Andrea & Dora

How we arranged the festival in Finland

Our project is coming to an end and in order to summarize and celebrate what we have achieved during the past two years, each school has organized a “festival” of some kind. The purpose has been to show others what we have done and learnt and spread the message about the importance of minorities and minority languages.

In Finland we celebrated the project during an entire week in mid-May. The week before we had invited a guest to come and talk to the whole school. Our guest was the actor Sampo Sarkola who talked about the relationship between language and identity. He shared quite a lot of personal experiences and told us in what way he feels it’s different to do theatre in Finnish compared to Swedish. We had also made a visit to The Swedish Assembly of Finland, Folktinget, with the project group. Folktinget is an organisation with the statutory task of safeguarding the Swedish language and the interests of the Swedish-speaking population in Finland.

For the festival week itself, all the students involved in the project had been split into groups, responsible for one day each. We had also hung up posters around the school with information and pictures about all the minorities involved in the project.

The week started with a quiz about European minorities, prepared by Valter and Mats. They invited other students in school to come and take part and gave the winner a prize. On Tuesday, Alexandra and Linnea had another quiz, but this time the topic was languages. They played recordings of Welsh, Gaelic, German, Kashubian, Romansch and Finland-Swedish and the participants had to guess the language and in what region the language is spoken.

On Wednesday, Otto and Tomas gave visitors the opportunity to use VR-glasses and experience the 360 degree photos and Google flights that had been made during the meeting in Poland. The next day the theme was culture. Trine, Eva and Carolina had baked Welsh cakes and Scottish shortbread that they treated the visitors to. They had also made a collage of pictures from the meetings in Poland, Italy and Wales and compiled some information about customs and traditions in the minorities represented in the project. Friday was the last day and the theme was minority rights. Astrid, Valerie and Iia had prepared a sort of bingo game where students could mark the boxes they felt applied to them, e.g. “I can get service in my mother tongue” or “I can read newspapers in my minority language.”

All in all, we were quite happy with the week. It was a fun way to summarize the project for the rest of the school and for ourselves. As teachers, we are very proud of the work our students have done throughout the project and it’s been great to hear the students say that they feel they’ve actually learnt quite a lot.


Sarah Mattila & Brita Långström
Project coordinators

Drama manual

One of the final products of our project is a drama manual. The purpose of the manual is to function as inspiration and aid for those who want to work with theatre pedagogy as a creative method. Feel free to use it yourself and recommend it to colleagues!

DRAMA MANUAL