What is Building Bridges and Tearing Down Walls?

The Building bridges web site at http://www.alleberg.falkoping.se/bb/Front.htm is one of the many results of a Comenius 1 project among 10 European schools on democracy and democratic values worked on in the school years 2000-2002 . The ten schools presented on this website, students and teachers, have cooperated on and discussed democratic values in a present day- as well as a historical perspective with the aim of creating an awareness of the importance of democratic values and of mutual respect within a community among different groups of citizens.

On the web site you can find information about the participating countries, see and read the results of project work in individual schools, look at art work done by Swedes, Czechs and Danes, find jackals etc.

So far the cooperation has also led to exchanges, the production of videos, music CD’s, posters, art exhibitions, work with textbooks via the internet, and a lot of informative articles on life in the BB -countries.

In late April 2002 a BB - conference was held at Hobro Gymnasium & HF - kursus. 45 foreign students and teachers from 10 countries participated in workshops on democracy and contributed to a big show performed in front of the whole school. A Swedish media team filmed the whole conference, and the BB web site show extracts from their very professionally made video.

The work on the BB-web site will continue in this school year, which means that you will be able to find new articles etc.

Besides, most of the involved countries will work together on a less formal, non funded basis in 2002-2003.

On the initiative of the Purbeck School in Dorset, UK, there are plans to start up a new project on Heritage in 2003.

Building Bridges was originally started because there was a sincere wish to continue the fruitful cooperation started out in the Challenges project involving the UK, Sweden, Italy, Greece and Denmark.