Arppen school is a comprehensive school (grades 1-9). The total number of students is over 500. There are totally about 70 full time teacher and other members of school staff in the school. There are groups for special needs students having learning problems in the school. There is also instruction preparing (immigrants) for basic education. There is a large percentage of students, who have bilingual or immigrant backgrounds. Arppe school has been recently an active player in developing learning environments. We have put effort to e.g. use of ICT, multidisciplinary approach, development of learning environments and new teaching methods. However, we have noticed that although we do quite a lot of developmental activities, pedagogical results from associational activities remain usually quite weak. Thus, we believe we can develop the quality of our work in terms of associational activities, students' participation and active citizenship. The globalization and immigration have affected the compositions of student groups in our school as it has happend in a number of other schools in Europe. Heterogenic student groups are chanlling schools. Therefore, we have to develop teachers’ multicultural skills and at the same time we should be able to promote students' social cohesion, participation (in school and local commune) and active citizenship. The international context of the project provides a goog basis for developing these issues in our school .

We believe thatwe will achieve these goals throught the project activities - exchange of good practises among partner schools, educational activities for teachers, student workshops and research activities by teachers. The leader of the project, Jouni Ahlholm has been a leader in ERASMUS (Seek and Find Nature 2014) and COMENIUS (Countries and Stories 2012) projects in his previous schools. Although Arppe school has not recently been running ERASMUS/COMENIUS, it is active in international fields. We are doing e.g. school twinning with a Italian school and we host often foreign visitors from different countries.