School of Education

Open the Doors

An increasing number of teenagers and young people across Europe are enrolled in various support institutions aiming to prevent them from becoming NEET youth. These support measures are established as alternatives to the last years of secondary school or as a bridge from secondary school to vocational training or further education, and they target potential NEETs between 14 and 20 of age.  As NEET youth is becoming one of the most important challenges to the European societies, and increasingly will be, these support provisions are extremely important as interventions of prevention.  In short this means that the project will work with and through the teachers and youth educators and build up their capacity to involve potential NEETs in serious activities that will generate motivation, engagement and re-newed learning interest. As recommended by the Commission’s entrepreneurial education policy papers, teachers and youth educators will learn from practical experience and from lessons learned from this experience.  They will learn and capacity-build through organizing new and engaging learning activities with and for the young people enrolled in the settings, through joint transnational reflection forums and through collectively describing and documenting their accomplishments.

The core of the teacher and youth worker capacity building is to organize such practical learning activities that allow potential NEET youth to pick up 21st century learning mechanisms, to take a re-newed interest in learning and taking action and to equip them with valuable social eco-systems.  The practical learning missions are designed as a negotiation between teachers and small teams of young people, based on the combining of youth talents and interests on one hand and community needs on the other. Community needs include: making something that is useful to others.  The missions emerge from a successful linking of youth interests and community needs.

Such practical learning missions are not defined by their content, theme or interest, but by 5 basic principles.

Every project or missions need to some extent to include:

• Negotiating the mission: linking to the community (physical, social or virtual)

• Opening the door to making my interests and talents useful

• Creative technology fluency  (Opening the door to produce with and not just consume technology)

• Learning through real-life cases  (Opening the door to the realities outside the educational settings)

• Entrepreneurial mentality: create things  (Opening the door to taking action and initiative and to economy-thinking)

• International orientation and language  (Opening the door to working with other people and cultures outside one’s own city, country and language)