The necessity of being part of a community
Text: Franco De Toma, Liceo Scientifico e Classica, member of the EUFin project (Italy)
Photo credit: Heli Lehtsaar-Karma (member of the EUFin project (Estonia)
Before getting to know what EUFin was, I thought it had something to do with pills, medicines …even blue ones … created in Brussels, thanks to the very innovative University of Leuven, in order to help old professors or teachers ‒ like me ‒ to stand the many changes the near future would prepare us to face.
Then I started taking part in the so called “transnational meetings”, maybe another ambiguous way to say a formal meeting, hold in one of the five countries which are in the deal. There, at any meeting I had the chance to be introduced to very special people, not only as individuals, but even as a community.
For example, I was soon fascinated by the Estonian group: they are motivated, highly skilled and super ready to transform innovations in teaching into an advantage for their whole community. When I visited Amsterdam, I deeply felt the capacity they have to be a community. I stayed in a hotel that hosted not only a lot of young university students, but even professors or common travellers, so that the atmosphere was to have joined a hostel. Again, a community. I saw that the people there - in that piece of The Netherlands ‒ are always rushing ‒ as we do in Milan, but they let the passers-by get in strict contact with the rest of the community, while ‒ in Milan ‒ we keep the others not too close to us…
I felt like home every time we met
We are kind, it is true, but the sense of being part of a community is more linked to the kind of people and/or community we actually hang out with. I did appreciate our trip to Zilina, because I discovered a way to welcome a foreigner community, we ‒ in cities ‒ have lost: that dinner party and the strolling along the streets and the square (may be because it was June) were comfortable and sometimes even cosy. In my quality of southern European representative, I was shocked because of the heat up there, as if we were in Sicily ‒ maybe this is another effect of globalization.
Each single meeting made me really feel at home: it did not matter if it was Leuven (so similar to our medieval Pavia, which hosts one of the oldest Universities in Italy, like Bologna, Padova, Napoli or Siena) or in the just mentioned towns. Each time, I was happy for the experience and deeply proud of being European, the two immediate and easy to understand rewards of this adventure of ours.
However, it has been even more ‒ up to now ‒ for someone like me, whose task in life is to teach the beauty of a poem by J. Donne, the touching description of a passage by C. Dickens or the incredible modernity of the War Poets, such as W. Owen.
I learnt something new each single time
Indeed, I should thank Oliver and Sanne, who supported me in the mysteries of numbers, data and official documents. I should thank Marta, who was super comprehensive, whenever I grasped at following the procedures. She was extremely tactful to advise me, whenever I needed, without stressing the change of our roles: I had become a student ‒ who studied and worked a lot to do the assigned homework, trying never to fail; in the meanwhile, she had become a teacher.
Last September, when the sequence of tests ‒ and the game called Escape Room ‒ started to be carried out, I was so full of enthusiasm that, during a formal meeting among all the teachers of my Institution, I explained the news about our project, the results, the energy inside the team ‒ community and finally proposed the necessity ‒ for our school ‒ to introduce a course of Financial Literacy in the curriculum. Last October, a vocational course started and I am the supporter.
I also read the whole book we published ‒ I cannot say I did understand everything, but I realized that a paragraph written to explain a financial diagram, plan or chart may be as poetic as a poem by W. Shakespeare. Or even more, but do not tell my community of the British department, please.