Retour sur une session Etwinning entre nos élèves de 1ere3, un lycée belge et un 3ème suédois en mai 2026
By Annick Van den Eynde – teacher at Heilig Haart Instituut – Campus Heverlee – Belgium
I’ve been involved in several international projects at our school in the last 8 years. Before an exchange, our students have some ideas (prejudice) about the (school) life in the other European country.
“In Italy, they only have school until 2PM! They must have so much free time.” – “In France, we will only eat cheese and baguettes.”
When they come back from an exchange they bring with them an understanding of how similar they are from peers in other European countries. And they see that stereotypes and prejudices are almost always false. The differences that they experience in school life, make them more aware of the positive elements in their own school. In that way, each exchange, no matter what the theme and goal is, causes a deeper reflection on their own identity, culture and school life.
Unfortunately, we cannot go on an Erasmus+ exchange with all of our students. That’s why I’ve set up eTwinning projects for the last 4 years to work on these topics.
In the school year 25-26, I’ve worked with a group of 15 Belgian students (year10, 15 year old) during a 4 weak seminar. In the first stage they reflected on their identity. When you ask the question ‘Who are you?’, you start defining yourself in the groups that you belong to. (I’m a student from Heilig Hartinstituut Heverlee, I live in Leuven, I play football in this team…)
We asked students from Belgium, France and Sweden to create pie charts based on their ‘group identities’.
They posted them on eTwinning. They started to read the pie charts from their classmates. It was nice to see that they found a similarity with almost everyone in the class, even with the students they didn’t really know that well at the start of this seminar.
The next week they could see the pie charts of French students and they also saw reactions from Swedish and French students to their own charts. This created an excited buzz in the classroom. (“I’ve got mail!” “Oh, this Swedish student sent me a recipe for a typical Swedish dish because she read that I like to bake.”) For me, as a 40-year old teacher, this resembled my enthusiasm when I received snail mail from a pen pal when I was young.
In the second stage of the project they reflected on stereotypes. We discussed stereotypes we have about other countries, gender, professions… and we looked at how stereotypes are used in media (advertisement, cartoons, stories…) They posted the result on eTwinning, so that the students in the other countries could react to them.
Next, they created a cartoon based on a stereotype. The idea was to debunk the stereotype in an original way. In this lesson they were forced to reflect on their own stereotypes and to be critical in the way that framing, labels and stereotypes are such a big part of our initial thought process when we encounter something or someone new.
In the third stage of the seminar they reflected on their own culture. What is typical for our country? The goal was to explain something typical for our country / culture to the students in Sweden / France. They couldn’t choose the obvious landmarks, but they had to come up with something else. They created postcards and exchanged them on etwinning.
They read the postcards from the students from the other countries and in the process they discovered new aspects of their own and the other countries’ culture.
Lastly we talked about school culture. We researched school life in different European countries: how many days of school do they have? How many hours of school do they have per day? At what age do they start? What happens after secondary school? Based on some infographics my students created their own infographic to show what a typical school day in Belgium looks like.
They also worked on a presentation of their own school. (Size, options, typical aspects) to share it with students from France and Sweden.
Unfortunately this year we didn’t have time to have a final ‘live’ video meeting to discuss our project. But still, after four weeks of seminar, my students discovered more about life in other countries, but also about their own identity and own culture.
Mission accomplished! Do not hesistate to join us if you are interested in such etwinning projects !