Agrupamento de Escolas Moinhos da Arroja
The Agrupamento de Escolas Moinhos da Arroja (AEMA) is a public complex of schools, located in the council of Odivelas, a municipality close to Lisbon. It is made up of 4 schools (one kindergarten, two with kindergarten and primary education, and one with lower secondary education), with 99 teachers, 47 non-teaching staff, 2 technicians and 1619 students.
The AEMA receives students from a population belonging to a low and medium cultural and socioeconomic level. Our Complex as already been awarded at the national level with the following prizes (applications from the responsibility of school libraries): «Ilídio Pinho» prize, which distinguishes multidisciplinary and innovative projects in the areas of science and technology; the «Ideas with merit» prize, launched by the School Library Network (SLN), which aims to identify, promote and disseminate good practices in different areas of intervention; prize «Together we can read», launched by the SLN and Reading National Plan to distinguish the creation of inclusive libraries capable of providing reading opportunities for all the students; prize “Reading with the library”, launched by the SLN to distinguish articulation projects between the library and pedagogical work in the different areas of knowledge.
We also participated in the European project Open Schols for Open Societies (OSOS), which aims to initiate a process of transforming schools into innovative learning ecosystems, acting as multidisciplinary spaces for science learning. Our Complex competed for the “Living Science at School Clubs Network” and its application was approved and granted. The globalizing theme of the complex for the current school year, and the next two years, is “There is sea and sea … there is an entire ocean to take care of”. This work led the complex to apply for the Blue School, which is an educational program of the Ministry of the Sea whose mission is to promote the ocean literacy in Portugal. This national program distinguishes and guides Portuguese schools that work on themes related to the sea, creating a community of ocean literacy that brings schools, the sea sector, municipalities, universities and other entities closer together with an active role in marine education. Last April 14th 2020, we were informed that our application to «Escola Azul» (Blue School) was approved. We are now a Blue School. The school’s motivation to join this Erasmus+ project is the need to learn and share good practices with other European teachers about ocean literacy. We want to share our teaching practice and development it beyond borders.
