The Pilot Program of Mercats de Barcelona aiming at transmitting the values of the Market as a social space and a service of proximity to the school, the family and the neighbourhood, has been already executed and evaluated, and after testing its first results, has recently officially presented it for its official launching for the coming academic year.

This project, which has been jointly designed by the Barcelona’s Institute of Markets and the Commercial Department of the Barcelona’s County Council (Diputació de Barcelona), has elaborated a School Syllabus, designing a curricular plan to be implemented in the schools of the Barcelona Province and the city.
 

The aim of this School Syllabus is to structure in a single pedagogical set all the activities around and concerning markets that were already being informally offered in different school stages, as well as proposing new ones: visits to markets, teaching to count, to purchase, learning about products, even covering from nutritional aspects to the learning to use informatics and internet tools trough activities around markets, among many others topics. These activities have been adapted to every school stage (from 6 to 16 years old of compulsory education) with increasing levels of complexity and meeting all the pedagogical quality requirements to be able to be offered in the schools.

The project also includes the construction of a web page designed as a working interactive tool for the children, through which they will learn to work with the new Media: creating videos, uploading contents and documents, sharing cooking receipts and exchanging with other schools. This web page is now under construction, but will be operative already for September.

The MED EMPORION webpage will establish a visible link in its interface when this webpage will be operative.

In summary, the Objective of this program is to educate the youth of our cities in values linked to the markets, like healthier nourishment, sustainability, quality, proximity, social professionalism and co responsibility... using the markets space as a didactical tools.

Evaluating its first results.

This program was first introduced in several schools of the city of Barcelona and other cities of its Province with a big success. Thanks to the experience earned during this first experimental phase, a technical committee composed both by officials and pedagogical and nutritionist experts, has been evaluating its results and reassessed some points of the programme.

As a result of this, and given the favourable response of the schools and children, this program will be officially launched already the next September as a part of the official program to offer in all the Schools of the region. The objective is its progressive adoption by a big part of the Region schools during the following 5 years.

School programs and communication campaign.

Attached you will find the documentation that has been elaborated to this purpose, which includes several school materials: children exercise book, teachers guiding book and an objective's index summarizing the contents and expected learning for the specific stage. All this documentation has been prepared for every school stage: 1, 2 and 3 courses of elementary education, 4, 5, 6 of elementary education, 1st of ESO and 2nd of ESO (Secondary Education) comprising from 6 to 16 years, and making for a total of 12 working documents.

Of course, a communication campaign has also been launched with the goal of making the schools and teachers aware of this program, including two general presentations of the syllabus program with many teachers, the sending of the teaching proposal to many of the city of Barcelona and Province schools, together with a set of design placards to make the program attractive to school children.

Finally, the web page created especially for this educational program, will also fulfil this objective of both better disseminating the project results, and making the school work more attractive for the children and adapted to the new times.