"Digital VET Upskilling for Trainers and Women Beneficiaries [DIGIVET]European Commission Digital Education Action Plan (DEAP) 2021-27: ""The COVID-19 crisis shed light on the key enabling factors for effective digital education and training: connectivity and suitable digital equipment for learners and educators; teachers and trainers that are confident and skilled in using digital technology to support their teaching and adapted pedagogy; leadership; collaboration and the sharing of good practice and innovative teaching methods.""The DEAP outlines the European Commission’s vision for high-quality, inclusive, and accessible digital education in Europe. It is a call to action for stronger cooperation at the European level with a stated priority of ""Enhancing digital skills and competences for the digital transformation"". The DEAP also refers to the need for: ""advanced digital skills which produce more digital specialists and also ensure that girls and young women are equally represented in digital studies and careers."" There is a recognised gender imbalance regarding women with the level of digital skills necessary to move closer to the labour market. The OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey in 2018 showed that only 39% of educators in the EU felt well or very well prepared for using digital technologies in their daily work.The Europe 2020 Strategy recognises entrepreneurship and self-employment as key for achieving smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth. Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan: Section 4.2.4. Unemployed, in particular, women: Given the significant number of unemployed people across Europe, entrepreneurship support schemes should be put in place to encourage business creation as a route out of unemployment. Few business development support schemes target unemployed women specifically.Women face a variety of barriers:• Lack of awareness of the potential for entrepreneurship among role models results in a lack of encouragement or even a negative social attitude• Education and training programmes generally do not do enough to nurture entrepreneurial attitudes and skills• Lack of prior work and entrepreneurship experience is detrimental to business start-up and entrepreneurship performance• Limited business networks and business-related social capital have consequences for business start-up and obtaining legitimacy• Gender bias/inequalityWe will:• create a VET digital curriculum focusing on developing entrepreneurial mind-sets (E.G. recognising and acting on an opportunity)• encourage attitudinal changesDIGIVET will promote the following entrepreneurial qualities:• Skills and attitudes: women may have the determination and enthusiasm to run a business but may not have the appropriate skills-set and leadership qualities• Meta-qualities: to be developed through action learning sets; developing the ability of learning-to-learn; and identifying self-weaknesses for subsequent developmentPartners will meet in Month 2 to agree upon a draft curriculum to be presented to local VET stakeholders and women focus groups for feedback and review. Each partner will engage with a minimum of 5 local VET stakeholders and successful entrepreneurs, and engage with women focus groups (minimum of 5 women), and use the Plymouth Development Tool for Vocational Training (PDTVT) to underpin the curriculum development.Target Group: VET educators and trainers who can engage with women who are furthest from the labour market.We will use non-formal education methods to train 24 VET trainers/educators, from the UK, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Romania at a short term staff training event (C1) held in Romania in Month 12. We will use Kolb's Experiential Learning Tool to monitor the 24 VET ""trainees"" as they return to each work with 10 women beneficiaries (240 in total).6 Partners:Germany: AULUK: WSX EnterpriseAustria: VAEVUK: Make A Dream Publishing LtdItaly: CASCRomania: BUCOVINAPartners will meet 6 times during the 24-month project. At project end, each partner will host a local multiplier conference event, to a minimum of 30 attendees, to promote and disseminate the results and outcomes of the project. These events will be live-screened online for those who cannot physically attend these events.We will develop digital training resources that include 6 training webinars hosted on the internet. The project website, training platform, and resources will be available for a minimum of 5 years post-project.We will look at mapping the co-created VET digital curriculum to the EQF at level 3 at the project end.We expect 30%+ of the women to move into further training/employment or self-employment and 60%+ to improve their socio-economic and mental well-being (WEMWBS evaluation) following upskilled VET educator support.In the long term, DIGIVET will provide an innovative solution to the EU's declared challenge of improving levels of digital skills amongst VET educators."

Players of the artistic field got stamped and stigmatized as NOT relevant to the System – that is the most impressing picture that was painted during the lock down due to the Covid 19 situation since the start of pandemic measures and is still ongoing - It is being said that Arts and culture, artists and art education are not relevant for the system! We ask our selves if this is true? And we confirm that this claim is certainly wrong! We would rather claim that Arts, arts education and creativity belong to the most relevant fields in time of crises: this is valid for all European countries. Furthermore we would seek for solutions in order to improve the relevance of the artistic field, to fight against an certain art immunity that decision makers seem to being developing; artists want to help in the system of political decision making to rethink the topic of professional relevance priorities. Beyond that, artists would like to find answers to how to gaining an audience for (digital) artistic work and performances; therefore they would need to make researches for learning new digital semantic, how to raising knowledge for gaining an (new) audience. Most of the us artists, agency, arts schools, arts educators ask ourselves how to empower public artistic activities such as performances. The project would focus on activating the debate around professional relevancy discussion in the context of the pandemic, around the question of ephemerality of artistic stage productions within a communal policy and the difficulty to access to new audiences.It will also aim to raise the awareness for artistic processes methods and artistic trainings in order to transfer it into adult education training programs and to trigger the huge creativity potential of citizens of all age.Therefore the Partners’ knowledge will be extended and enriched by common experience as well as by diversified national and regional differences. The project will give answers to these questions by starting systemizing the individual questions and answers of our European partners due to their specific cultural environment in order to built up: a sample of good examples which would prove how arts, creative activities and approaches offer tools and new perspectives to empower resilience and innovativity as well as creative expressiveness and skilss development. The project partners will conceive workshops , public events and round tables in order to confirm their claim saying that art is definitely relevant to society and its citizens especially in the context of crisis and to explore new paths for gaining knowledge around the topic of new audiences and skills development among the non professional art performing adults as well as for professional artits on educational issues.The project would give rise, justifiably to remove the impression among the political claim that Art and Creativity are not relevant, by giving answers an impulses against social isolation and the seek for resilience, psychical and physical health , for social wellbeing The project would help empowering local groups to go for discourses with stakeholders. It would also help building a media library and a logbook in order to keep a record of the processes. The project would furthermore strengthen the access to work on social and political topics by seeing for artistic solutions which could be transferable .

<< Objectives >>The objective of this project is to develop a civic integration education tool using storytelling and other non-formal learning methods for refugees/migrants that have difficulties with formal learning methods. We want to improve the civic integration education provided by teachers as well as help the learners; which in turn will generate a better social inclusion, for refugees, migrants and other people with learning problems and a bigger distance to society.<< Implementation >>CASE STUDIES (to test the tools created on their usefulness, practicality and effectiveness with people in the field)TRAINING ACTIVITIES (e.g. Joint Staff Training and Train the Trainer events to test and finalize the outcomes of the case studies)MULTIPLIER EVENTS (e.g. local multiplier event and a final conference to share the results of this project with trainers, teachers and other stakeholders)PROJECT MEETINGS (for project management, sharing knowledge, creating tools and evaluation)<< Results >>* a toolkit with civic participation and integration exercises, using storytelling and other non-formal learning methods for (new) refugees as well as guidelines for teachers that work in civic integration teaching* a (digital)self-assessment tool to assess the acquired skills and level of integration in an encouraging and fun way* a blueprint on how to provide trainings using the tools * an interactive digital platform with the tools, guidelines, project information, reports on case studie

For society migrant entrepreneurship is a powerful driver of economic growth and job creation since it creates new companies and jobs, opens up new markets, and nurtures new skills and capabilities. For each migrant and refugee, having the possibility to achieve self-employment have an impact on all aspects of daily life, including an income, gives identity and gives life a meaning and purpose. Recent research and statistics show that integration of migrants is slowing down, not only in partner countries, but in most European countries that have received refugees in recent years. This fact is an opportunity to rethink the strategy and find new ways to succeed. To stimulate, train and follow up more migrants to become entrepreneurs will therefore provide major results for individuals, families, communities and society as a whole. Therefore the partner organisation wants to establish this project, which is a systemic approach to increase self-employment among migrants by entrepreneurial training and follow up. The project will develop and share methods and tools for successful training and follow up activities, including how to motivate and build self-confidence for entrepreneurship. The project will develop a curriculum for tailored entrepreneurship and language training for migrants, supported with new training methods as well as an online platform, which not only allows for an exchange between tutors, trainers and participants, but includes training modules so that tutors and trainers can develop their methods online. Furthermore the project will develop a customized “Digital business simulator “, tailored for migrants to score their idea. This tool will helpful for both the migrant and tutors, trainers and other person supporting the development of the migrant’s business idea. The methodology involves aspects of traditional and creative formal education methods as well as informal education methods. The experience will be summarized in a “best practice handbook”. Each partner will conduct a pilot among motivated migrants, where the developed methods and guidelines within tailored language training and/or entrepreneurship training will be tested in all countries. As a result of the project, some participant migrants will be self-employed and many more will have an increased awareness of the opportunities that exist to such tailor training. The positive effects of training will likely motivate local and regional authorities to give this opportunity so even more migrants can undertake training. For trainers and tutors the project will help them to improve their methods in planning and working with entrepreneurship training and follow up activities. In order to achieve longer term benefits, the project’s methodology is centered around a close cooperation with all stakeholders, such as governmental education and employment institutions, innovation institutions and migrant organizations. The professional network of the project partners aims to create a network where one reaches as many potential participants as possible in a given region, and show how it is possible to work together in order to be self-employed.

lternative Ways to Learn a Second Language Strategic partnership between: Storytelling Centre (NL), Arbeit und Leben (D), GO! (B), Elan Interculturel (FR) and De Talentenschool (NL) Timeframe: September 2018 - August 2020 Main objective: Developing new, alternative and innovative methodologies to learn a second language using storytelling and other non-formal learning tools for students that have difficulties acquiring language skills through the existing formal learning methods. Main tangible outputs - a toolkit with guidelines for languange teachers and educators who are active in the field of language teaching to refugees (and other migrants) who have difficulties learning a language using the formal methods. Since many language teachers/coaches work as volunteers, we want to design a toolkit that is accesible and easy to use by people that are not professionally involved in this work as well; - a portal (IO8) via which information gathered during the project (like the Foundation Bricks, reports on the case studies and relevant literature and reseach results) and the final results (toolkit and guidelines) will be available. Besides we train 40 language teachers/coaches/educators in using the toolkit in the course of the project. Rationale: Many mainly Northern European countries are busy taking care of creating the possibilities for language learning and many organisations, both non-profit and commercial, discovered the market and offer courses. Of course, there are also companies developing these courses, working with experts on language and culture. Many new-comers benefit from this and learn the language and the culture more or less easy. They reach a reasonable level within a year (B2 or even B1), which serves as a base for further development. However, for a certain group this is no solution. They are not able to study using the methods that are offered to them. The reasons are various, but often we are dealing with people who did not learn to learn, mostly because they only finished primary school (or not even that), who are illiterate of who are used to read and write in a different script (Somalian, Arabic or even Chinese). For this group the existing, often formal learning methods are not beneficial at all and they keep on failing for their exams with the result that they are lagging behind in their integration process. The partners in this project have the experience in working with this group. Based on that we can state that it is often not the intelligence of the students that blocks them. It is a mismatch between their learning skills and the existing learning methods. Although different partners already developed some alternative learning methods, we notice a need of high quality, structured language learning methods for this group with fewer opportunities. That is why we decided to join forces and start a project in which we share knowledge and design a new method together. Non-formal learning is the starting point. We involve tools coming from our experience, like storytelling tools, games and dialogue tools. In order to assure high quality output, we collaborate with an experienced organisation in developing methods to acquire language skills (mainly focusing on people dealing with a second language), de Talentenschool. In order to start this development at the right level, we made a need analysis, in which we looked at our own experience and at the needs of the group we would like to serve. This need analysis is attached. One of the outcomes of this need analysis is that the use of the method should not be limited to 'new' refugees. Many people living in the partner countries for a longer time, can benefit from this method as well. They often did not learn the language properly (also because 20/30 years ago it was not obligatory to learn the language in some countries) and still have difficulties in reading and writing. Though our focus is on refugees, we do not solely focus on this target group and explore which other groups can benefit from it as well. Target groups Primary target group: language teachers and educators. (It is important to note that many people within this target group will work as volunteers and we will keep that in mind in the final design of the outputs) Secondary target group: People who want to/have to learn a new, second language but who lack the learning skills to acquire the language through existing formal learning methods. The main focus is on refugees, but the methods can be used for the language acquisition of other migrants as well.