La VITA è bella!

VITA award for innovative practice and initiatives on validating competences in informal and non-formal learning in Europe

We are looking for innovative learning projects in all educational fields (from school to higher education, vocational training, adult learning, youth, volunteering and mobility projects etc.) that promote the development of these competences in an innovative way and include practical cases or at least ideas on how learning outcomes and competence developments within this specific competence area can be assessed and evidenced also beyond the walls of formal education.

 

The VITA prize is an award given to most innovative and promising European initiatives and projects that

• work in an innovative and novel fashion;
• focus on integrating SPOC in learning contexts;
• reflect on/consider ways of measuring and documenting learner’s development in relation to these competences;
• promote understanding and awareness for the evaluation / validation of informal and non-formal learning and highlight its value either for the individual (whose competences were validated) or
• for the organisation (who validates competences).

 

 

Who can participate?

The competition is targeted towards individuals, companies, training funds, professional groups, NGOs, VET schools, schools, universities, youth organisations, public authorities, institutions of LLL, civic society organisations, social partners, professionals and researchers.

 

Participants must live in one of the following countries:

27 Member States of the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland, Croatia or Turkey.

 

How to participate?

Ongoing or completed, existing or planned case studies, initatives or projects can enter the competition.

 

To participate please click here: http://mahara.vita-eu.org/view/view.php?id=141

When is the closing date?
The competition entries are to be presented by August 20th, 2013.

And the award goes to…

The contributions will be evaluated by an independent jury according to the following criteria:

• Innovation: Original solutions to non-formal and informal learning problems and needs
• Validation: The way learning outcomes are assessed and evidenced
• Impact: Potential and actual effect on participants, learning context and the society in general
• Sustainability: Continuation of this innovation
• Transferability: Potential use of the innovation in other contexts

The jury will select two projects per category: adult education, schools, VET, higher education, Youth in Action.

Award ceremony in Dublin, Ireland
The ten winners will be invited to present their project at the VITA-conference which will be held on October 9th, 2013 in Dublin with an international audience.
The prize includes travel, accomodation and subsistence for a 2-day trip to Dublin. All winners will get the opportunity to present their cases during the final conference and will benefit from a European wide dissemination in a specific newsletter and on our VITA website.

What is VITA?
VITA is a European GRUNDTVIG project funded by the European Commission under the Lifelong Learning Programme and stands for Validation of Service related Learning Outcomes with an IT based Assessment and Evidencing System.

You find more information on the project on our VITA website: www.vita-eu.org

We are looking forward to your contributions and wish you the best of luck!

If you have any further questions please contact:
Bozica Ilijic
Tel: +43 1 532 45 45 – 1139
Email: b.ilijic@dieberater.com

Too old to volunteer? Think again!

 

Mr. M is 72 years old and a retired market research manager. Once a week he works as a volunteer for a neighbourhood project which offers after-school care for kids from socially disadvantaged families - in particular those with migration backgrounds. Each week, one afternoon Mr. M dedicates his time to school children, helping them with their homework, in some cases he supports them in learning German or he offers them some leisure activities. He is very motivated to do something useful for the people living in his neighbourhood, especially for children and migrants.

With his engagement, Mr. M is one of tens of thousands of senior people in Europe who use volunteering activities to stay active, to contribute to the community and to share their experiences with others – often younger persons.

But it is not only the others who can benefit from senior volunteering engagement – there is also a benefit for the volunteers themselves. With each situation when people act together and engage in new tasks and experiences collectively, they can learn from each other. This is why volunteering is considered as a means of informal education.

Senior volunteering plays a key role in our society and demands exposure and recognition! Yet reliable and convincing methodologies for the assessment and validation of the impact and outcomes of senior volunteering are missing. By developing a tailor-made competence assessment system the EU project RIVER (Recognition of intergenerational volunteering experiences and results) aims at making learning outcomes of senior volunteering visible and thus add to senior volunteers’ motivation and sense of achievement.

At the moment the RIVER methodology is tested in five European countries in different volunteering settings like intergenerational culture projects, social neighbourhood initiatives, a senior volunteering university, etc..

Read more at www.river-project.eu

Supporting Prison Officers and Foreign-National Prison Inmates

 

A report in Der Standard (http://derstandard.at/1358305154185/Mehrsprachig-im-Haefn describes the massive problems that exist with multi-lingualism in prisons and the criminal justice system – according to der Standard, Austrian prisons are populated by individuals from no less than 110 different nationalities!

Whilst a great many of foreign-national prison inmates have lived for years in Austria and can speak fluent German – or at least can communicate with prison staff in English – those with proficiency neither in German nor English have to rely on interpreting from other inmates with important tasks such as filling in forms and understanding prison rules and regulations.

This not only presents a problem for individual prison inmates, but places a massive strain on prison staff and officials, who work extremely hard under very difficult conditions to maintain a positive, orderly regime.  Any communication difficulties between staff and inmates must be very frustrating for prison officials, and could leave to difficult – and potentially dangerous – situations.
Prison staff currently have the opportunity to take English training as part of their professional development through the Strafvollzugsakademie, but according to der Standard there are few opportunities for prison staff in Austria to learn how to communicate in Russian, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian or other languages which are common amongst the foreign-national prison population.

Without these language skills, prison staff are prevented from being able to communicate important instructions and regime information – and foreign-national inmates are unable to fully understand their rights.  As reported in der Standard, inmates would be likely to miss important family or legal visits, if they have no idea what the word ‘visit’ actually means.

Whilst der Standard acknowledges that the current situation is less than optimal, the project Languages Behind Bars (LBB) is addressing the issue head-on.  A European-Funded Project, Languages Behind Bars is developing and piloting a new learning programme to help foreign-national prison inmates communicate – and understand – key prison-related information in the local language.  At the same time, these learning materials are offered to prison staff in multiple languages, providing them the opportunity to communicate instructions in various important languages.
Coordinated by die Berater® with the support of the European Prison Education Association (www.EPEA.org), LBB is being piloted in Germany, France, Holland, Bulgaria and the UK.  We hope to be able to make these learning programmes available in Austria in the future.
For more information on the LBB project, visit the website www.lbb-project.eu. 

Internal training seminar – using the “Health Box” in a training context

Healthy Lifestyle through education – following this motto an internal training seminar was organized at die Berater® in Wels. The aim of this training workshop was to present and to introduce the training material which has been developed in the EU-project “Health Box- Integration of Health Issues in Adult Education”. The material was created to reach socio-economical disadvantaged persons with health issues, to raise awareness, to provide information and to show them how their lifestyle is connected with their health.

The core element of the workshop were hands on activities – to try out a selection of the developed exercises, discussing them with the trainers, asking them about their experiences with health topics in their courses.

Explain the term “breakfast” without using the following “taboo-words”: eat, morning, coffee, get up, meal - Last Wednesday eight trainers of die Berater® Wels spent one afternoon getting to know a playful way to integrate health topics in adult educational settings. With this playful version of the popular game “Taboo”, they discussed positive and negative aspects on alcohol consumption and they tested their knowledge on drugs and their long term consequences on health.

8 trainers of die Berater® Wels participated in the Workshop, 6 of them are working with youth. What they report sounds startling: A high percentage of their course participants suffer from bad nutrition, overweight and show bad physical condition, which influences their general health condition and thus their employability. Therefore the topic “health” is an integral part of their training activities. The Health Box training encouraged them to continue their work on health issues, using new tools. All trainers are fully aware of the fact, that this is only a small piece of contribution they can provide. Especially the involvement of parents would be an important aspect to support young people in changing their habits. Maybe the idea for another project?
To download the Health Box training material go to http://healthbox.eu/index.php?id=2&L=1

Developing Creative Training Methods in EU Candidate Countries

In mid-February we held a hugely successful train-the-trainer programme in Vienna, for delegates from Antalya, Turkey for the European project APPSA (Achieve Pedestrian Priority and Safety in Antalya City Center).  The training programme provided creative methods for promoting road safety and pedestrian priority to diverse target groups ranging from primary school children to driving instructors.

The focus of the training – developed within the framework of the European Transfer of Innovation project APPSA – was on enabling driving instructors, police officers and traffic safety officers to create target-group-oriented training courses using a variety of multimedia materials, adapted to learners’ various ‘multiple intelligences’.  The trainees will be using their new skills to develop their own tailored trainings in Turkey, disseminating this best practice to over 50 new road-safety trainers in Antalya.

Source: Transport of London

Our trainees learnt that teaching road-safety legislation to learner drivers can involve more than just dictating a set of rules. Instead, by using various multimedia materials, such as this shocking image from a recent road safety campaign in London, trainers can begin to have a real impact on the knowledge, understanding and attitudes of learners.

The training culminated with a practice-training, in cooperation a Vienna-based driving school.  Our trainees from Antalya had the opportunity to develop short training sessions, and practice them on a specialised group of Turkish-speaking driving instructors from the driving school U3ver.
How would you use this image to create lively training sessions, that get learners moving, talking, planning, thinking?