On Friday, February 11st, a conference was held at the Inmaculada Jesuit School in Alicante, part of the EDUCSI – East Zone network of schools, designed to share good practices in Erasmus Plus projects from the centres in the area, among which there is a long experience, not only in this program, but also in other international projects.

The conference was coordinated by Marta Munté, coordinator of international projects at Jesuïtes Educació, Maria Grandío and Aitor Bilbao, coordinators of Erasmus Plus projects at the Montesión de Palma de Mallorca and Inmaculada de Alicante schools, respectively. They and many people from the Inmaculada School – which hosted the event magnificently – worked hard to ensure the undoubted success of the event.

EDUCSI, as the educational sector of the Jesuit Province of Spain, has assumed the commitment of the Society of Jesus to work on different aspects of Ignatian spirituality and pedagogy through “global citizenship”. In this narrative framework, we have to situate the internationalization strategy of our schools. Some international projects that respond only to certain exchange activities or language learning -although they are interesting activities for students and their families- do not today respond to the global perspective, from the commitment to the local context, which is transformative and that contributes to growing 4C people for a world, that of the 21st century, complex and clearly improvable.

Based on this idea, the conference was planned with three basic objectives:

• Share experiences of Erasmus Plus projects and internationalization of schools in the Eastern Zone – EDUCSI. Twenty-five educators involved in international projects from twelve of the thirteen schools in the area participated.
• Situate these projects under the gaze of Global Citizenship, as a backbone and as a strategy so that the internationalization of our centres is one more engine of work of the essentials of our evangelizing mission, beyond the undeniable, more concrete contributions of the activities associated with these programs: travel and coexistence, learning in various fields, improvement in languages.
• Scale this dimension from the local and concrete interest of each school to broader structures, such as EDUCSI and JECSE, and even to networks of Jesuit centres beyond Europe. Likewise, having the complicity of SEPIE (“Spanish Service for the Internationalization of Education”), as the government entity under which these projects are located and to which they are financially endowed (this year –for all Erasmus Plus European Programs- there are more than 28 thousand millions of € for it!).

Responding to these objectives, representatives of these institutions participated with very interesting contributions, which made it possible to focus on these objectives, inspire future possible paths to undertake and resolve specific doubts. Thus, we had -in addition to the initial greeting from the General Director of the centre, Mr Roberto Garrido- with Mr Antoni Parellada, director of Institutional Relations and Global Citizenship of Jesuïtes Educació, Mr Miguel Poza, training coordinator and member of the EDUCSI Commission, Mrs. Mercedes Pastor, coordinator for the European Funds of the Province of Spain, Mr. Brian Flannery (adjunct director) and Mrs. Agnieszka Baran (director), both from JECSE. Mr. Andrés Ajo, Director of the School and Adult Education Unit of SEPIE, the National Erasmus + Agency for Education and Training, also accompanied us. Mr Joaquim Molina, coordinator of the educational centres of the Eastern Zone in Spain, collaborated with the three coordinators of the day in organizing it.

Let us hope that similar initiatives can be carried out in the future. And, above all, that many other Jesuit school institutions, in Spain and Europe, can join these Erasmus + projects -as a lever that will allow us to further strengthen our network of Jesuit schools-, facilitating collaboration between our centres to guarantee the procedures and to subsequently enjoy the benefits of being part of it.