“Octavian Goga” National College, Sibiu

The Colegiul National “Octavian Goga”, located in the city centre of Sibiu, is one of the biggest schools in the area (1955 students aged 6-19 and 115 teachers).

Our high school students, who are the target group in this project, are from Sibiu and from other small towns nearby. A few students, benefiting from government scholarships, come from poor economic backgrounds and some students are of ethnic origin other than Romanian (Hungarian, German, Moldavian and Arab). We also have some Roma ethnicity students who are accepted in our school as part of the equal opportunities programme.

The main teaching language is Romanian, but there are also Hungarian and German main teaching language classes. We have both science and humanities courses and our pupils specialise in mathematics and computer science, natural science, social science and philology. There is also a bilingual programme in English at high school level. Our goals are to offer quality education and prepare students for prestigious universities admission, but also to equip them with the 21st century skills (tolerance, initiative, teamwork, leadership).

We offer a wide range of optional courses and extracurricular activities meant to improve students’ social and communication skills, from field trips to literacy projects, clubs – astronomy, handicraft, music, and entrepreneurship.

Our school has held the title of European School since 2004 and this is an honorary title awarded by the Ministry of Education to a small number of schools that can demonstrate high performance associated with involvement in EU and community projects, promoting the European dimension of education.

Our teachers are actively involved in implementing new technologies in their teaching strategies using online learning platforms and testing tools. However, participation in this project is an additional opportunity to benefit from equipping our students and teachers with more digital skills and with opening up our curriculum to cinematography that we have not yet approached in our educational aims, taking into account that media literacy is one of the national priorities.

The school, in fact, would benefit from using the materials developed by the project as resources for a new optional course on Cinema Literacy in our curriculum in order to enrich students’ knowledge and their cultural background. The participating staff of 10-15 teachers of various subjects has already had experience working on international projects, therefore they will cooperate at any stage of the project, implementation, organisation, dissemination of products and results, thus fulfilling their needs to develop digital, communication, intercultural and professional methodological skills. Both teachers and students will benefit from the exposure to good practices offered by our partners, and they are expected to improve their competence in communication in English, interpersonal communication, intercultural and social skills, tolerance.