ToWEaST

ON mates’ LINE

(Aina Horcas, Marta Magallón, Francesca M. Roncoroni and Yuchen Song)

We believe that cultural exchange in a globalized world is the key to healthy communication and respectful interaction for any personal and professional purposes.

While maintaining cultural distinctiveness is a right and value for each and every culture, people need to know, understand and respect other people’s specificity in order to promote harmony and better opportunities for the next generations across the world.

With this in mind, our vision as language teachers is based upon young students being encouraged to learn more about their own background, discover different cultures, and think critically about ways to value both sense of identity and cultural diversity in order to promote their own traditions and appreciate what different cultures have to offer.

As a first step toward this aim, we have designed ToWEaST, a tele-collaboration-based project that intends to engage young students from the West – Barcelona, Spain – to the East – Shanghai, China – in an amazing challenge: helping the West to understand and value the East and vice versa, while boosting skills in English as a Foreign Language.

Activities, contributions and various forms of output related to this project will be "twisted together" to ensure that everyone is fully engaged and that every single step forward is built upon the previous one(s).

So welcome aboard, fasten your seatbelt and get ready to answer the following question:

What would you do if you suddenly woke up in Shanghai/Barcelona?