meetings > 1st Plenary Meeting - Montegrotto Terme - Italy > LETTER TO PARTECIPANTS

Bergamo, 27/10/2005

Dear Partners,

our meeting is now close and we are looking forward to seeing you all.
We are very busy with the final arrangements: by tomorrow we'll send you some interesting articles that we think can offer good opportunities for background readings. You are welcome to circulate whatever material you think useful for our discussion.

We are also sketching a provisional structure for our website www.seedseuroproject.org and we have asked the graphic designer who usually works for the STRESA network to provide us with some proposals for a possible logo for our project, so that we will be able to analyse and select them together (or maybe to change completely, who knows?). This is mainly to make our discussion more concrete and fruitful…

Since this is our first meeting and it is in Italy, we, as Italian partners, would like to take this opportunity to grasp the best from the international discussion to broaden the reflection in our groups, particularly in the STRESA network, where there is a very deep interest for the developments of the SEEDS project. This is why we have thought of inviting a few more guests apart from the official participants in the meeting. These are teachers and heads who will develop the more "local" part of our work and experts who are involved in our initiatives. We are looking forward to introducing them to you, since when it comes to travelling abroad it will not be that easy to a have a big group. So you will see quite a lot of Italians around and we hope that it will be a nice opportunity to get together and to understand a bit of Italy.
Among the guests, sponsored by the STRESA network, Mrs Francesca Brotto and Mr. Claudio Federico from the Directorate General for International Relationships of the Ministry of Education in Rome and Mr. Roberto Serpieri, a sociologist from the University Federico II of Naples.

A very distinguished guest we have invited is Mrs Maria do Carmo Climaco, former Deputy Head of the General Inspectorate of Portugal. Carmo has a broad international international experience, having had relevant assignments in OECD and other international institutions. She is also a very dear friend of a group of us (Italy, UK, Catalunia), having been a partner in several projects in the last few years. We think that her experience (and her time, now that she has just retired!) could be a precious resource to support some aspects of our self-evaluation throughout the development of the project.

But we are not thinking only of work! We strongly believe that an international meeting, particularly with a new group, needs also some social and leisure opportunities. So we are planning a (we hope!) very special surprise for you… This will occur, as you will discover in the agenda, on Friday afternoon, in the middle of our work, so that we can benefit of a boost of "élan vital" (together with a touch of sense of guilt!) to make the hard work of Saturday (full day engagement) more effective and creative.

A final note: we would like to benefit from the opportunity of the project network to develop some new Comenius 1 projects with our schools. It would be nice if you could join the meeting with some ideas in this regard (primary and lower schools interested in cooperation, topics, etc.)

With best wishes for a nice trip to everyone and the warmest regards,

Giovanna and Gianfranco



PS Materials are following tomorrow!