Euroscola trip

The European Parliament runs a competition every year for Advanced Higher Pupils in Scotland. Niam Dunn (AH French) was selected to represent Marr College at the Euroscola day. She was amongst 26 other pupils from all over Scotland. The Troon Rotary club kindly sponsored Niamh’s travel. The whole trip was organised by Articulate, a company specialised in educational language trips abroad. It was a wonderful experience as Niamh with her peers got to meet students from all over Europe and work with them on debate such as immigration, environmnent and cultural heritage.

During this trip, she had the opportunity to visit the Council of Europe, do a street survey in French and make a film on Strasbourg. On the Euroscola day, she attended a multilingual discussion with a French MEP, Edouard Martin.  It was very interesting to listen to the simultaneous translation of the interpreters. This was followed by an afternoon of parliamentary debates on which she had worked with her group.
It was a great experience for Niamh and below you will find her diary of the trip.

On the first day, we met at 8am at Glasgow airport. We immediately did some team building exercises in French to get to know each other. We played some French people bingo and created sketches where we imagined meeting our new friends in twenty years’ time. Eventually we arrived in Strasbourg at around 8:30pm, and went straight for dinner. After dinner, we headed out for a night time city tour. Kara gave us some information about the main sites in the city centre including the Notre Dame de Strasbourg.

The next day we had breakfast then headed to the Conseil d’Europe, where we got a tour and learnt about the work they do there. For lunch, we went over the ‘pont de l’Europe’ to Kehl in Germany. We had lunch there and many of us tried the regional food. After lunch, we went back across the border into Strasbourg to do a street survey. We prepared our questions in French then went out into the city centre to ask the French locals. After many failed attempts and rejections, Daniel and I finally got a couple of responses to our survey. Later we went back to the hostel to discuss the results of our survey and prepare for the Euroscola day. After dinner, we went on a tour of ‘la Petite France’, the old part of Strasbourg. Kara told us stories about the beautiful building and canals.

 The next day we did ‘défi de Strasbourg’. We were challenged to create documentaries about Strasbourg in French under a given theme and including as many subjunctives as possible. My theme was ‘Strasbourg a European city’, we went to cafes in our activity groups to plan our documentaries. We then went around the city filming our documentary with an iPad. Our idea was to talk about the German aspects to the French city and we filmed our documentary in five different languages. After dinner, we had a French and European quiz, unfortunately my team only came second.

On the day of Euroscola, we got up early and took the tram to the European Parliament. To begin, every country was introduced by two representatives from that countries, they gave facts about their country and the schools the came from. After the introductions, we had the opportunity to ask questions to Edouard Martin, a French MEP. There were questions asked about the Paris agreement, immigration, gender inequality and the rise of right wing politics and much more. After lunch, we did a quiz in teams of four, and each member had to be a different nationality. The quiz was in twenty different languages, and most of the questions were on the European Union. I was with a Greek girl and a Romanian boy and a French boy, so we had a wide range of different languages, however we didn’t win. After the quiz, we had to get into 5 groups, to discuss our chosen topics. My topic was ‘the European year of cultural heritage’, we spoke about different ways to promote different culture within Europe, for example, a Europe wide festival that celebrated the many cultures within Europe, promoting exchange trips in schools and promoting foreign TV and film. Then we reported them back to Edouard Martin, the French MEP.   Everyone was able to debate the many different proposals put forward, it was really interesting to see how drastically opinions differed between countries. After Euroscola, we had dinner then sat in a local Brasserie to watch the documentaries we made the previous day and spend some time together before leaving the next day.
 
Overall, it was a fantastic experience that I would highly recommend to everyone and I am so thankful to the Troon Rotary Club for allowing me this opportunity.