What is wrong with language learning? Why is Language felt as one of the least attractive subjects at school? Could language lessons become more exciting and effective? And why not teach Language across the curriculum? These have been some of the questions we have been discussing when reflecting on basic skills in the 21st century school and how to enhance them. The answer we would like to explore is a three-decade-old, yet still innovative learning and teaching methodology, known as Suggestopedia or the Lozanov method. It is the pedagogical application of Suggestology, the interdisciplinary research field experimenting on the power of suggestion in communication to liberate the subjects from inhibitions set to their performance by the social norm and facilitate the untapping of their reserve capacities. In suggestopedic schools in Bulgaria and Austria Dr. Lozanov's methodology was implemented to teach all subjects in global themes with great results (see www.litta.net) long before the term 'cross-curricular' entered our syllabi.Our partnership consists of six upper-secondary schools in Europe; five of them offering general education and one vocational school. We are all facing similar problems such as professional burnout among the staff, low participation in EU and international projects due to lack of confidence in their communicative competence in English, low achievement of pupils in all subjects, low interest in school and a rising number of pupils from different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds that need support in fostering their communication skills and integration. All of the teachers involved in this project share the same enthusiasm with culture and faith in intercultural exchange as a vehicle of change in society and education. With three of the partners having already experienced the impact of Suggestopedia as a foreign language learning methodology and one of us being a certified trainer in it, we decided to exploit its potential to boost our pupils' creativity and help them design innovative courses of language and culture to apply in peer-teaching their languages to their partners and schoolmates whose skills in the school's official language need upgrading. Each of the schools will engage from 20 to 40 pupils locally and internationally.This proposal promises to enable us to achieve three main goals that each of our schools has set out to pursue in their European Development Plan, namely the inclusion of our pupils from different ethnic backgrounds so we can prevent early school leaving, the intercultural exchange that will benefit both the staff and the pupils and opening to innovation that will upgrade our teaching skills and the effectiveness of our schools. Before commencing, the participants will have been prepared for this project via an eTwinning project (ID 217537) open to the whole school communities in all project countries; focusing on local and European cultural heritage seeking ways of sustaining it through sharing it. For the purposes of this project, they will be inspired by Suggestopedia to incorporate the tokens of their intagible culture identified as worth-sustaining and worth-sharing in innovative language courses based on culture. These courses will be the tangible products of our Erasmus+ project named Language via Culture as they will contain multimodal cultural and historical texts (stories, legends, myths, quotes, jokes, songs, poems, literature, art) creatively orchestrated along a storyline. We are planning three types of activity; the design of the suggestopedic language courses for each of our project languages that will take place locally and will be open to the whole school community, the peer-teaching of each 15-hour course to the participants from the other partner schools by the school team hosting each Learning, Teaching and Training Activity and the peer-teaching of each language course by the pupils who speak this language as their mother tongue to their classmates from other ethnic and linguistic backgrounds throughout the project duration on a weekly basis for a total of 80 hours. As a follow-up activity refugee and immigrant pupils will be trained by their peer-teachers and the teachers participanting in this project to design their own suggestopedic courses for the accelerated peer-teaching of their own mother tongues to their schoolmates and other peers from the local community. In this way, we are aspiring to take a major step towards multicultural exchange and social inclusion. To assess the achievement of our objectives we are planning to use survey questionnaires, standardised language tests and interviews. All of our products (course materials, tests, evaluative reports and video recordings of our lessons) will be made accessible to the whole eTwinning and Erasmus+ community online. We hope to be able to inspire more organisations to implement Suggestopedia for the transformation of education from meaningless routine to joyful creativity.

"According to the UNESCO Background Note on the necessity of safeguarding cultural heritage (2013), ""sustainable development and cultural heritage are inextricably linked since the latter plays a vital role in the protection of environmental resources and human wellbeing, especially due to the threats imposed by climate change, globalisation, urbanisation, the world financial crisis and growing inequalities"". At the same time, the European Commission stresses the significance of sustainable tourism. In its Communication, ‘Agenda for a sustainable and competitive European tourism’, it proposes ""sustainable tourism actions ... aiming at diversifying the tourism experiences on offer in the EU"". In this context we have taken the initiative to propose an Erasmus+strategic partnership project coordinated by Greece and run in cooperation with Turkey, Italy, Spain, Germany and the Czech Republic in order to foster our students' awareness of environmental and cultural sustainability alongside encouraging entrepreneural initiative-taking in alternative tourism. Besides, we wish to give our students the chance to make life experiences by cooperating closely with other European students and to contribute to their personal development, the activation of European citizenship attitudes and the development of their basic skills and key competences. All participating schools operate on the level of secondary education with pupils aged 15-18 years of age. The Italian school is a comprehensive school with an artistic orientation. The Turkish school is a vocational high school specialising in ICT. We all have some experience in EU programmes and cherish the idea of cooperating in this project sharing a deep concern in all the issues it addresses. Each school has initiated discussion of an activity with suggestions that have been endorsed by the other partner schools with great enthusiasm. The activities proposed address diverse aspects of environmental issues, i.e renewable energy applications, organic agriculture, environmental interventions, sustainable architecture and urban planning; tangible and intangible forms of cultural heritage, i.e. agriculture, architecture, urban planning, ecosystems, language, art, music, nutrition, folklore, migration, medicinal practices; all of which accommodated in alternative tourist guide plans. For each acttivity there is a coordinator and an evaluator school team. The coordinator collects materials from all schools and assigns the presentation of the final products to another school. As regards European cultural heritage, we aspire to create multi-modal texts such as:- organic seed bags, a seed bombs game, organic orchards in schools - sample tea bags, video guides to spas, the ""Family doctor"" role play, massage and exercise workshops - an e-game identifying sustainable buildings and a photo exhibition of our common architectural styles - a recipe book, role plays presenting local folklore, traditional games, dances, myths and tales - artworks inspired by our cultures - a DVD of a festival of traditional songs performed with traditional instruments and a choir from all six schools - a comic narrating the history of our ancestor's migration paths As for Sustainability and Entrepreneurship, we want to sensitise our students about the energy crisis and other environmental hazards and encourage them to devise business plans aiming at preserving energy resources and biodiversity through innovative applications with a dual emphasis on Renewable Energy and Tourism. We intend to produce:- documented interventions i.e. river renaturation, reforestation, beach cleaning; a film about sustainable urban planning - 3D printed or built models of renewable energy applications, such as a solar car, solar battery chargers, wind-powered kites, pellet heaters etc; an e-catalogue of state and private green enterprises - a website hosting local initiatives in the field of alternative tourism As far as skills and key competences are concerned, our activities aim at fostering our students' personal development with life skills, cross-curricular knowledge and transfer of knowledge, foreign language communicative competence, digital skills as well as 21st century citizenship competences and attitudes. Concretely, we are planning to:- create and apply mini courses to peer teach our languages to our partners- design and carry out our own tourist guiding programmes for virtual and actual sightseeing To sustain our project's products and extend its impact we will make sure that they can be used in the long term as teaching resources across our school curricula. To disseminate our messages and results to our local communities we will hold exhibiltions and other events with the aid of local authorities; to reach the global community we will exploit the EU education platforms and the social media."