The demand for skills shifts towards more sophisticated tasks and technology pervades all aspects of life. Jobs increasingly involve analyzing and communicating information. Challenges in VET include strengthening efforts to promote creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship, and ensuring professional development opportunities for VET teachers and trainers. ICT skills will become more critical in terms of getting and keeping a job and in managing everyday life. “Qualifications should include foreign languages, and international cooperation between institutions should encourage new approaches to teaching and learning." (Bruges Communiqué). Social economy is an important pillar of the European economy. More than 4.5% of the active EU population is employed there. At the same time the social economy sector is the main alternative for the development of many rural regions in Europe. But social entrepreneurs face challenges, among which lack of modern and easily accessible training resources. The SET2CLIL project aim is to contribute to the development of entrepreneurial, language and digital skills in VET, to the enhancement of digital integration in VET and the promotion of easily accessible continuing VET, including for the rural areas, by creating three intellectual outputs: SET2CLIL Curriculum, e-repository and Trainer Guide. To achieve the above, at least 750 participants will be involved among whom: would-be and acting social entrepreneurs, VET learners, NGOs and decision-makers in the social sector, VET providers, authorities and policy-makers, VET teachers and trainers (content and language teachers, bilingual teachers), teacher training institutes and providers. Management, monitoring and evaluation activities, as well as a wide range of dissemination and exploitation efforts and events will accompany the SET2CLIL development process of the Curriculum, e-repository and Trainer Guide. The SET2CLIL project is actually merging language teachers' expertise, social entrepreneurs' expertise and ICT expertise to achieve an important synergy: an innovative, open-access, easily-recognizable, learner-centered, time-saving, cross-curricula VET solution with value added. Such a solution is supposed to bring significant short and long term benefits within and outside the partnership, as well as on VET systems of the participating countries. The project capacity to use and build on the project results after the end of the funding period is considerable. The outputs will be widely disseminated among the relevant targets and policy-makers and will be created in a way to allow for easy transferability and adaptability to different contexts and targets.
Jobs increasingly involve analyzing and communicating information. Challenges in VET include strengthening efforts to promote creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship, and ensuring professional development opportunities for VET teachers and trainers. ICT skills become more critical in terms of getting and keeping a job. “Qualifications should include foreign languages, and international cooperation between institutions should encourage new approaches to teaching and learning." (Bruges Communiqué). Social economy is an important pillar of the European economy. More than 4.5% of the active EU population is employed there. The SET2CLIL project results have the potential to contribute to the development of entrepreneurial, language and digital skills in VET, to the enhancement of digital integration in VET and to the promotion of easily accessible continuing VET. 3 intellectual outputs (curriculum, eRepository and trainer’s guide) have been created by partner institutions from 5 EU countries: Infocenter (an accredited VET Center from Bulgaria), Professional Foundation (a non-profit foundation from Romania providing certified continuing education), Vocational and Technical Secondary School for girls in TK, Mary Immaculate Collage from Ireland providing undergraduate degree programmes, postgraduate programmes to doctoral level in Education and in the Liberal Arts, and a Spanish private company dedicated to rural development. The partnership achieved the results by involving in the project activities over 750 would-be and acting social entrepreneurs, VET learners, trainers, teacher training institutes, NGOs and decision-makers, authorities and policy-makers, content and language teachers, bilingual teachers, ICT teachers, teachers in economics, etc. Such activities included: researches and surveys, selection of real-life stories and creation of case studies, resource development and evaluation, dissemination and valorization, multiplier events, etc. The SET2CLIL project has actually merged the expertise of language teachers, social entrepreneurs and ICT trainers to create an innovative and open-access VET solution. It has opened the conversation of social enterprise and developed awareness by providing an accessible curriculum with the additional elements of language and digital skills. The project partners have created a curriculum focused on developing skills in Social Entrepreneurship (SE), English Language and Digital skills by applying the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) method. The curriculum provides the opportunity for both trainers and learners to develop key competency skills that are transversal and can be applied in a variety of different contexts with learners from different backgrounds in the SE sector. The curriculum will allow the learners to develop key skills in SE by studying content through different perspectives using every day English oral language, reading and writing skills and more subject-specific target language terminology through a variety of different digital means and resources. Learners are supported in undertaking the curriculum by eRepository of more than 150 training activities, videos and other resources. Trainers are further supported in delivering the Curriculum by a Trainer’s Guide advising them on how to successfully incorporate the resources in their teaching. The project capacity to use and build on the project results after the end of the funding period is considerable. The outputs have been widely disseminated among the relevant targets and policy-makers and have been created in a way to allow for easy transferability and adaptability to different contexts and targets. Impact evaluation shows that although the outputs have initially been thought for VET they are an invaluable resource for the secondary school classroom too. All project materials are free and accessible at: http://set2clil.tryavna.eu