Grammar and vocational school Zvane Črnje Rovinj offers education to pupils between 14 and 18 years old. Both parts of the school (gymnasium and vocational) offer opportunity to access university but is also possible to graduate without gaining the right to attend university. The school has 380 pupils in four departments and 36 teachers who teach in all departments. Our four departments are classic (general) grammar school, mathematical grammar school, business and economics grammar school and computer technicians school. 55% of students are in vocational department. Our school is in Rovinj, region of Istria, Croatia. Our pupils come from an area of up to 50 km around Rovinj. The computer technicians department is unique in Istria and therefore attracts pupils from such a wide region. Istria’s main economic activity is tourism and jobs related to tourism like agriculture, fishing and trading. Tobacco business was also very important in Rovinj but those days are gone. We are bilingual area – Croatian and Italian.
The main religion is Christian and in minor but significant parts Muslim. First steps toward quality measurement systems have been taken and implemented in our school. We have staff of various skills, from common subjects to specific subjects related to economics and IT. Our foreign language skills and IT expertise will contribute to the project. The IT group includes pupils from all departments. All our teachers and lecturers have official psychology and pedagogy degrees beside neccesary vocational degrees like B.Sc or master degrees. In addition, they take part in teachers’ training courses on issues like dealing with pupils with special needs on a regular basis and we have assistants for our disabled pupils. Our pupils have part-time jobs in tourism during the summer and are used to dealing with people with different backgrounds. It
is very important for us that our pupils see and understand that foreign people are not only tourists. We also try to widen the pupils’ horizons concerning countries which are different from ex-Yugoslavia or Italy. They should see Europe as their native home now and become EU citizen. We took part in project OBST where we gathered first expiriences with EU projects and transnational cooperation. We manged to organize transnational mobility which we found successful. We learn a lot from previous project. About 25 professors and lecturers and 80 students already took part in EU activities since now. We expect to develop cultural awareness, digital and language competences, social and civil competences among the students and professors. We see this project as our next step in being more EU then before.
