Istituto d'Istruzione Superiore Francesco Ferrara Mazara del Vallo Italy

The Istituto D'Istruzione Superiore, "F. Ferrara", a technical and vocational school located in Mazara Del Vallo has 1050 students aged 14 - 19 years old and 150 teachers. The social context is medium low and the unemployment rate in the families is rather high due to the heavy economical situation our country is living. It is a school with different branches in Tourism, Administration Finance and Marketing, Services for gastronomy and hotel sector, health care sector, Maintenance and Technical Support. They do activities related to the labor world as The Simulated Enterprise Training, that allows students to learn while they are working, offering them the acquisition of working skills. It is also "a school center for Alternating School-Work offering opportunities to develop social and practical skills to be considered as an added value in the job market. Many branches integrate the specific professional skills with foreign languages and IT and contribute to the innovation and improvement of our school inside the European dimension. Their goal, in all branches is to strengthen our educational opportunities to attract more pupils and parents to promote qualitative educational services as well as being known at a local, regional and international level.

The school from Italy is located in an area with a good local tradition in the field of a fair, healthy and environmentally-friendly food system and also have several protected areas and nature reserves and it can share experience in healthy and environmentally-friendly food system (Mediterranean food).

In the current school year the school has started a project which aims to raise awareness among students about the uniqueness of the natural heritage of the coasts of the region, as well as to raise awareness on the problems deriving from marine pollution, increase in marine litter along coasts, beaches and in the sea.

Environmental education project on separate waste collection: in order to educate students, the school has in recent years promoted a training activity regarding separate collection, reuse and waste reduction. In order to successfully propose important issues from an environmental and social point of view such as separate waste collection, an attempt was made to stimulate the active involvement of students through targeted work in the classroom to recall good practices, introduced with playful activities such as quizzes and competitions to identify the more virtuous class.