August 2017 No. 18
Teachers of the project As one of the longest-serving and oldest teachers of the project, I bring along a lot of experience both in teaching and in conducting international projects. Having taught mainly English and Religion for most of my career, it was teaching Intercultural Studies for 13 years that paved the way to international projects. As I did not only want to teach knowledge from books to my students, I looked for contacts with European schools. The emergence of eTwinning played a very important role in those efforts, and soon I had established a number of contacts, mainly with schools from Eastern European countries, where people were much more interested in contacts than teachers from Western Europe. It was the time of EU Eastward enlargement, and it was pretty clear to me that these countries would play an important part in the economic future of my students. Virtual projects and first mutual visits then lead to the need to seek EU financing, and so Comenius projects and Erasmusplus projects followed, we have been doing that for more than 10 years meanwhile. The experience and success also brought along the fact that we participated in most of these projects as overall coordinators. I see my main aim as a teacher to provide the best possible education and training for my students, not just from the point of view of knowledge and competence, but also from the point of view to have an open mind and be prepared to embrace new ideas and challenges. With quite a number of students with a migratory background at our school, it is important to help them make use of their abilities and integrate into society. Lifelong learning for today´s young people is a must, if we want to meet the challenge of the digital revolution ahead and the prediction that most of the jobs young people of today will have to fill have not even been invented yet. Having children of my own attending higher vocational schools, I also see school life from the learner´s perspective, which is sometimes quite interesting as it opens the view to a different angle. The quest for a healthy lifestyle has induced me to
take an interest in running in recent years, a habit I try to pass on to my students when I encourage them to take part in actions like “school running”, where I also participate actively. Last but not least, I firmly believe that language proficiency is a very important contribution to mutual understanding, not only verbally, but also on an emotional and cultural level. Each language has its own way of expressing things, and thereby broadens the thinking and widens people´s horizons. I hope that with this project we can contribute something to these aims. Michael Huber-Kirchberger
I was born on 2nd March 1968 in Linz where I have been staying for my whole life. I have an older brother and a little sister, no kids but I have been married since 2007. After finishing Secondary Vocational College in Traun I studied Business and Economics Education in Linz and worked at a tax office for a little more than two years. Since then I have been teaching a lot of subjects: informatics, business administration, business exercices, healt management, sports management, developping personal and social skills, project management and accounting. Accidentally I stepped into my first international project in 2008 which was called CEECONOMY - and I fell in love imediately which international projects. ESCAPE is now my third project I am very looking forward to be in more projects. Thanks to my parents who took us kids on holidays abroad I am still a traveller - but mainly in Europe especialy by car or by train. Twice I had the chance to work abroad managed by a students' association called AIESEC: six weeks in Verona/Italy in 1990 and six weeks in Wuppertal/Germany in 1991, both times in accountig departments. Beeing in a project I feel young again - like a student then. Elisabeth Hasiweder Austria