PARTICIPANTS

Antoniano Ikastetxea is a school located in the centre of Zarautz since 1912 and has around 60 educators working with approximately 600 students from ages 1 to 16. Our students enter the school when they are 1 and leave it at the age of 16, so they work in a family-like environment, as we see and help them grow from a very young age. 

 We have a D model, which means that a big part of our curriculum is taught in Basque, although we also have lessons in Spanish and in English. In secondary school we have a program called SSLIC: Social Sciences through a language integrated curriculum. In this program most of our students acquire Social sciences and history content through English language. 

At our school multilingualism is a key issue for us so we also provide English lesson to students from a very young age: year one.

We also offer French lessons in secondary school and internationalisation being one of the key objectives of the school, since the year 2010 we have organised language and cultural exchanges with several French schools. 

Bilingualism is part of our lives since we are born as citizens from Basque Country. We are surrounded by it, we live it at home, on media and in the street. It is part of our culture. Being this our situation, we have a particular motivation in studying and experiencing another bilingual reality such as the Dutch one, different to ours but similar in some aspects, in order to learn from it, enrich our knowledge and help us in our quest for multilingualism.

Visser’t Hooft is a protestant christian secondary school in the centre of Leiden, Zuid-Holland. The school has around 1300 pupils, aged between 12 and 18. The school offers vmbo, havo, vwo and gymnasium education and has it’s own bilingual department up to year six for havo and vwo level. 

Our school offers Chines as a modern language up to exam level. Furthermore we have a collaboration with the ministry of education of Spain, together we have set up a intensive language program for Spanish, Camino Español, in the higher grades. The ministry provides us with a native speaker to teach these classes.

Visser’t Hooft is part of the tto-network and the Elos network. Internationalization is an integral and recognised part of the school. Management, staff, students and parents are aware of this focus.

Visser’t Hooft, conforms to the set requirements for tto and Elos schools. This means that we have an extensive international program. In the past ten years we have built a network consisting of schools in many countries; France, Germany, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Spain, Sweden, Italy, Finland and England. With some of these schools we have built an exchange program for pupils in year three. Other partners are a result of the former Comenius projects that our school participated in. 

Part of the curriculum is the subject EIO, European and International Orientation in the lower grades and the subject Global Perspectives in year four. Next to these specific subjects the school tries to arrange an international project (e.g. Globaland, Cross your borders) in each year.