Agricultural High School ‘Vrsac' from Vrsac,
SerbiaLocation
Agricultural High School in Vrsac is located in a lovely town called Vrsac
situated only 86km from Serbia’s capital city Belgrade and only 14 km away fromnational border with Romania. It is set in the province of Vojvodina, part of Serbia
famous for thousands of hectares of arable land and agriculture. Vrsac is also atown of art, business and sport, famous for clean air, beautiful countryside andvineyards. This town is a unique connection between rich tradition and modernlife. For more information, visit www.vrsac.com.
About the school
Agricultural High School in Vrsac was established in 1921. For more than
90 years the school has been successfully educating many young generations ofstudents. Today, the school has 520 pupils divided in 21 classes of agricultural,food production, veterinary and tourism and catering professions. The school
educates students in the following fields of work:
Agriculture, food production and food processing with the following
educational profiles:• agricultural technician• technician for biotechnology• veterinary technician• butcher and baker
Trade, catering and tourism with the following educational profiles:• tourist technician• waiter• cookAgricultural High School building
For more information, visit www.bioskola.edu.rs
1

In order to give our students chance to develop other interests and talents,
our school has a lot of different Club activities such as:
1. Japanese club (started on June 12 2013.)
2. English club
3. Agricultural club (grapes growing, organic production, etc)
4. Ecology club
5. IT club
6. Tradition and customs club
7. Tourism: World Travelers Club
8. Cooking club
9. Sports club
10. Music
11. Drama club
Agricultural High School ‘Vrsac' has 50 qualified teachers and we areproud to say that we have established good cooperation with Agricultural HighSchools from other countries such as Austria and Slovenia as well as long
tradition of cooperation with High Schools from Romania. We are often involvedin many local and national projects of various kinds and a number of them havemulti-cultural background.
The school took part in many cross-boarder projects with High Schools
from Romania. All the projects were funded by European Union. In 2006 we havesigned a special Agreement of Cooperation with High School ‘T.T. Niti’ fromTimisoara, Romania and since then our two schools share the ideas andexperience and visit each other on regular basis.
Our school cherishes tradition and customs of people from this region ofBanat, province of Vojvodina. We carried out a project called “Traditional Breadfrom Banat” in order to save the recipe of this special sort of bread.
After the NATO bombing of our country in 1999, our school was worriedbecause of danger of possible radiation and hazardous substances in local food,so we carried out control of locally produced milk on heavy metals.
Since we are agricultural school, we pay a lot of attention to agriculture
and farming. We are proud to say that we started organic production in ourschool and since 2010 we have a certificate for organic production.
Our school is also involved in many projects regarding the environment
protection and ecology. We have excellent cooperation with local Ecologicalsociety ‘Avala’ and the school also had its own Ecological society “PanonianIsland”. We are aware that as an educational institution we can help raising theawareness of ecological problems not just among our students but also within thelocal community. We had many activities in order to encourage local people toget involved in waste separation and become familiar with the importance ofrecycling. Our students together with our Computer science teacher took part incompetition called ‘Green Games’ for which they created a PC game oncollecting the garbage.

2

We have excellent cooperation with Center for Energy Efficiency (CEFIX)
from Vrsac and few our teachers are actively involved in work of this centre. Themost recent project in which our school took part was called “Share yourKnowledge – Win the Prize’ and it was organized by CEFIX. We are proud tosay that our students won the prize – a digital school board. The task of theproject was to show that students are able to share their knowledge about
ecology, energy efficiency, renewable energy sources and protection of theenvironment and to publish the articles on these topics on the web sitewww.cefix.rs. The project lasted from April to June and our students published
175 articles altogether and won the first place and the prize.
Agricultural High School from Vrsac is very excited about the chance tostart cooperation with Agricultural High Schools from Japan. We are happy to
inform you that we established our Japanese Club on June 12. Our English
teacher Mrs. Anita Djuric-Stojkov has also studied Japanese language so she
started teaching our students Japanese language. We are pleased that there aremany students who want to be the members of the club and to learn Japanese
language and to get to know Japanese culture and tradition. They were all very
excited about the possible cooperation with the fellow students from Japan.
Project on cooperation with Agricultural High Schools from Japan
Key persons for the project:
1. School Principal – Mrs. Svetlana Radojkovic
Mrs. Radojkovic started her career as an engineer of Technology, thenworked as a Technology teacher and after years of experience, she became a
School principal of Agricultural High School in Vrsac where she has been theprincipal for many years.
Mrs. Radojkovic is the president of two professional associations. She is
the President of Serbian Chemical Society – Vrsac department and the Presidentof Serbian- Norwegian Society. She has been involved in various projects onprotection of the environment (Waste water examination, Milk control, Additives
in food production, etc.). She also has a number of publications from the field ofenvironmental protection. She has been the manager of various cross borderprojects and involved in international educational cooperation.
2. Deputy principal – Mr. Zdravko Starc
Mr. Starc is also a Mathematics teacher in Agricultural High school inVrsac for 35 years. He is a member of National Association of Mathematicians.
Mr. Starc has published various articles in national and international Mathematics
journals. He is especially interested in Japanese educational system and tries tokeep up with the latest news in that field. As a deputy principal he is also involvedin various school projects and international cooperation. Since 2004 he is thePresident of the Association of Slovenians in Vrsac.

33. Computer Science Teacher – Mr. Miroslav Cuca
Mr. Cuca is a Computer Science teacher in Agricultural High school inVrsac who also runs IT club for students. He is a member of National Associationof Mathematicians and Informatics Alliance of Vojvodina. He attended numerous
professional seminars and courses such as:
Oracle University (educational center in Belgrade Serbia, May 2005 – July2005) and gained the title of Oracle Certified Associate as well as Oracle
Academy in Prague, Czech Republic (April 2010 – July 2010) and gained the titleof Oracle Academy Teacher.
He attended the seminar by Serbian Network for Energy Efficiency inIndustry (MEEIS), Innovation Center, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering,Belgrade University(January 2013 - February 2013) and gained the title ofEnergy auditor in the industry.
Skilled and experienced in various projects of cross-boarder cooperation
as well as number of projects funded by European Union in the fields ofeducation, culture and environmental issues. He is an active member of theCenter for Energy Efficiency (CEFIX) in Vrsac and took part in many projects
regarding energy efficiency, renewable energy sources etc. He is experienced in
narrative and financial reports composition, logistic support, documentationtranslation, tender documentation preparation, web sites and databases creationand maintenance. Fluent in English.
4. English Teacher – Mrs. Anita Djuric-Stojkov
Mrs. Djuric-Stojkov is an English teacher in Agricultural High school inVrsac. She also studied Japanese language and literature at Belgrade University,Serbia. She started Japanese club at our school where she teaches students
Japanese language and tries to get them familiar with Japanese culture andtradition. She is an experienced English teacher who has international
experience (she attended Advanced English language course in London, UK, for
one year). Mrs.Djuric-Stojkov also has experience in working for non-governmentorganization, Save the Children, UK in Belgrade, Serbia, for three years. Shewas involved on various projects such as Mobile teams and Children workshops.
She attended numerous seminars on English language teaching professional
development as well as non-violent communication and children’s rights. She is
one of the authors of the handbook ‘Mobile teams and Children workshops’
published by Save the Children in 2003.
Mrs. Djuric-Stojkov has also taken part in various cross-boarder projects
and international cooperation, worked as English-Serbian translator and wasinvolved in many school projects. She also runs English Club for students in ourschool.
If we get the chance to cooperate with Agricultural High Schools fromJapan we would be happy to involve more teachers from our school dependingon the type of project activities.

4Agricultural High School from Vrsac is very excited about the chance tostart cooperation with Agricultural High Schools from Japan, Hyogo Prefectural
Agricultural High School and Hyogo Prefectural Sayo High School.
This cooperation will enable all the schools involved in the project to exchange
ideas and experience from many areas of agriculture and environmental
protection as well as to bring more important, cultural exchange. This project will
also bring benefit for all the students because they will improve their skills andknowledge and experience new culture and meet new friends.
Project Proposal
Since our schools are miles away geographically, the first steps would beto make them closer via Internet communication. The idea was to get students tocommunicate and connect with each other through different mutual projects.
Cooperation and exchange programme can have a few fields of interest
such as Ecology and environment protection, Agriculture, Japanese and Serbian
tradition and Customs, Healthy Food and some topics that are attractive toteenage students, for example, music, pop culture etc.
Both schools, from Japan and from Serbia should establish student clubs.
For example they could be: Ecology club, Agricultural club, Tradition andcustoms club, Cooking Club and / or Music / Pop culture club. For a start,teachers would organize students who are willing to take part in this project into
those clubs. The communication should be in English, so English teachers arewelcomed to participate and help the students.
Teachers will give the students and their clubs appropriate topics forresearch (same topics for all schools) and they will do a small research and thenmake a short presentation, write an article or PowerPoint presentation on thesubject and send it via email or post it on school’s Facebook profile(https://www.facebook.com/PoljoprivrednaSkolaVrsac) to the students from otherschools to see. It would be a good idea to create a new web page for the
purposes of this communication and enable other students and people to see
their project presentation and work.
This would be a great way for students to improve their knowledge from different
areas of interest, to exchange ideas with other students, to develop their creative
potentials and of course to practice their English.
We can also include more people from the local community in the project. For
example, for Ecology topics we can ask experts from Hyogo Hands-on Ecology
Center to propose some environmental subjects for research.
In this way students from all schools on the project will discover new
information, get new ideas, improve their knowledge and skills and moreover,promote the ideas like environmental protection and cultural exchange not only totheir schools and local communities but also to wider population in bothcountries.

5After the phase of exploring the given topics, students write the articles orcreate their presentations after which they exchange their researches andinformation collected on the subject matter. In this way they learn and discover
new things.
Final part of this cooperation would be to organize a Quiz for the students
from all schools involved in the project. The best way would be to make itpossible for students to meet each other in person and to visit other school,
either in Vrsac, Serbia or in Hyogo prefecture, Japan. This final quiz will not be
just educational for the students but also challenging and entertaining for all theproject participants.
The final quiz should cover all the proposed areas of interest andresearch:
1. ECO quiz
2. Agriculture quiz (e.g. Organic production quiz)
3. Japanese and Serbian Tradition quiz
4. Food quiz
5. Pop culture quiz
The opportunity for both students to visit other country and see, meet andtaste the new culture would be priceless experience for all of them. Especiallysince our two cultures are different and we are sure that Japanese and Serbian
students would benefit greatly from this exchange visit programme.
The proposed project has several benefits to all the schools involved inthe project. It helps students understand the importance of maintaining a healthy
environment and the multitude of factors that affect the natural world around. It
gives teachers a chance to teach authentic, hands-on lessons while introducing
current and relevant issues. It also provides students with valuable experienceand exposure to new culture, new country and meeting new friends. It is proventhat this kind of student involvement, through research and unconventional
methods of teaching and learning, sparks their imagination and creativity. In
other words, this kind of learning can be more fun and appealing to modern
generations of students no matter where on the planet they live.
To sum up, this project will raise awareness on the important topics ofecology, agriculture, cultural exchange, etc, not just among the students, but theirlocal communities and population in both countries. It will give new aspects to thepower of education and its opportunities when schools share their experienceand develop new connections. This project is definitely of national andinternational importance because it will connect and bring closer two countries:
Japan and Serbia and show that young generations of students are those whowill through knowledge and enthusiasm build bridges between our, only
geographically far away countries.

6We had an honor and pleasure to meet Professor Takeshi Nakano at
Symposium of Chemistry and Environmental Protection – EnviroChem 2013 inVrsac, He visited our school and we had the opportunity to exchange some ideaswith him.

Professor Takeshi Nakano and Prof. Vladimir P. Beskoski visited our school in May 2013

We are looking forward to start cooperation with the Agricultural HighSchools from Japan and meet our fellow teachers and students.
Best regards,
Project team of Agricultural High School ‘Vrsac’, Serbia

7