Learning to Learn and Self-Directed Learning: an innovative approach to support employability

Many citizens of Europe have been experiencing unemployment and current labour market has limited job offers (often not matching what potential candidates could offer). Unemployment is nowadays the main challange in Europe that obliges all countries to think of new strategies and resources to be developed if we really want to create a growing economy based on knowledge. Tackling unemployment is much more than helping someone in finding a job! An efficient strategy has to be holistic and consider the human beings in its whole and complexity. It means supporting people in discovering their passions, increasing their self-esteem, createing a supportive network, facilitating their learning competence development. It is about promoting employability Learning to learn becomes then the most crucial key competence for lifelong learning and for developing employability, therefore, educational staff need to acquire and develop more and more competences and methodologies for implementing this concept of learning. L2L is the key competence in this process – meaning that it provides keys for unlocking the doors to other competences. The speed and the complexity of our society and of the labor market require independent learners able to define what they need to learn, when, how they can do it, what resources they need, to plan it, to take an active role and the responsibility of this process; in other words they need to know themselves as learner and to (self) direct their learning. It implies: self-esteem, self-assessment abilities, engaging in learning processes with the others, ability of planning and realizing the learning, competence in giving and receiving feedback, being able to drive emotions to support inner motivation, ability to stand ambiguity and to take responsability both of the process and of the outcomes. In this way, we believe that L2L and SDL can be an innovative approach to be used in working with unemployed since they foster an holistic development of the persons that surely increases their emploaybility level and chances. Thus, the project aimed to: - promote learning to learn and self-directed learning as a tool for personal development and independency for unemployed people; - explore and become more aware of the role of the environment, of the facilitators and of the group in a learning settings inspired by democratic education; - increase the competence of a number of adult educators in facilitating the L2L and SDL through specific training actions; - provide unemployed people an innovative space where they can experience L2L and SDL, discover their passions, create a network and finding useful information for their professional development; - invite and support adult educators and unemployed people in using ICT for learning and in learning/improving the knowledge of a foreign language - exchange good practices among the partners The expected results during the project and at its end were: 1) A research on innovative education: role of environment, role of support staff, role of the group (others/peers) in the learning process and the differences with the „ traditional institutional learning places“ so that they can be used as leading principle in the setting of the learning space for unemployed people 2) Four "learning spaces" for unemployed people, one in each country. The spaces were available once or twice per week and were attended by 2 groups in each country. The space were supported by adult educators properly trained that helped the learners in discovering their passions, finding information on what they need, create a network with the other unemployed people and with different services within the municipality concerned. 3) An improvement of the competences of 15 adult educators about SDL, L2L, innovative education, trained locally and through the learning mobility 4) The realization of an Action Research and the creation of a "model" that can be transferred to other realities 5) Four multiplier events The partnership was carried on by 5 organisation (2 in Italy, Belgium, Turkey and Iceland) and is an outcome of a previous Grundtvig Learning Partnership The main activities were: - kick off meeting (Belgium, 7-10 January 2015) - research on innovative educational principles and settings (mainly included in the IO1) - implementation of a blended learning strategies for educators that involved 15 facilitators - the creation and implementation of the learning spaces, involving 2 groups of unemployed people in each country, for a total of 84 unemployed and 15 facilitators - a learning mobility for adult educators (Calabria, 3-7 November 2015) - Action Research and Creation of the Learning Space Model (intellectual output 1 and intellectual output 2) - A final multiplier event in each country - Final evaluation meeting (Padova, 27-30 August 2016)