Learning to Learn By Teaching 2 builds on the Grundtvig project L2LByTe in which many of the partners have worked together, but also continues the excellent work of two other Grundtvig projects: Vintage and A.L.I.C.E. The objective is to further respond to the need for an adult education training for teachers, which implies a fundamental shift in the roles of both teachers and learners towards the adoption of peer and cooperative education and building learning materials quite different from what the publishing market supplies for young students. In the Grundtvig project L2LByTe we embraced the Flipped class concept asking our adult learners to create knowledge clips about dances and songs, traditions and food and drink. Thus they could improve their use of English, digital competence and intercultural awareness. Next we set out some activities to accompany their learning trajectory, discussed our roles as learners/teachers and started the debate on assessment. Many questions still remain to be explored mainly as to the nature and use of knowledge clips, but also as to their impact on the learners. Knowledge clip, teacher and learner identities and class activities have to be linked in a more systematic way. Also assessment of the impact of the whole methodology has to be brought about more in depth and completed. So tackling on Vintage online self-evaluation tool for the key competences in 21st century and on A.L.I.C.E. approach, which draws on creative languages (digital storytelling, music, children’s literature; games and social media, art crafts with paper and recyclable stuff, cooking and autobiograpical writing), L2LByTe2 will facilitate adult learners acquiring the skills of the 21st century: creativity, adaptability, expression of self and collaboration with others, along the lines of Knowles, Freire and Mezirow’s pedagogies. L2LByTe2 is innovative because: - it creates a trajectory which connects the three Grundtvig projects; - digital storytelling is used as a way for adult learners to make sense of this new approach; - Mezirow's transformational learning is linked to Victor Turner's liminality, Burke's and Jerome Bruner's concept of the dramatistic pentad to allow learners to create meaningful stories; - Pratten's "A practical guide for beginners" is used to help learners create multimedia stories; - intergenerational learning is applied to family literacy and authentic learning to create significant stories. Moreover, both the team’s discussion and the products resulting from the activities take place in a virtual learning environment, which is something 70% of European teachers would like to learn (UniTusMoodle). The outputs will be: an open online course made up of 32 learner's knowledge clips, 4 teacher's knowledge clips, 1 adult teaching knowledge clip to teach teachers about adult learning; methodological guidelines to be collected as resources for further teaching experiences; learning/teaching/training materials for assessing adults’ creativity, adaptability, self-expression and collaborative skills. Finally a multiplier event will be organized consisting in a festival showcasing adult learning clips. All the outputs will remain open access to prospective users and a particular attention will paid on dissemination through more traditional as well as multimedia channels. The partnership (9 members) is formed by some of the participants to L2LByTe to ensure continuity and flow. New partners have been invited to strengthen the link with teacher education. The idea is to create a mix between teachers who teach in formal and non-formal adult education on the one hand and teachers who work in teacher training departments. All the partners have experience in adult education be it in postgrad trainings, vocational trainings, non-formal community schools. One of the partners is a specialist evaluator, whose role will be to evaluate the quality, effectiveness and outcomes of the project activities, including partnership, products, dissemination and mainstreaming. This partner will also be in charge of evaluating the impact of the project, which is expected to be relevant both in short and long term. The short term will involve the participants themselves and their organizations as well as their target groups, who will all be made familiar with innovative learning/teaching methods and will be called to experiment with the creation of knowledge clips. As to the long term impact, it cannot be evaluated within the time frame of the project. However, the partners’ organizations make the commitment that about one year and half after the end of the project they will try to evaluate some of the outcomes, namely the long term improvement in the target’s group transversal skills and the efficiency of the products. Such an effort, apart from possibly contributing to the development of future projects, if positive, will have a major effect to the sustainability of the project products.
Learning to Learn By Teaching 2 built on the Grundtvig project Learning to Learn by Teaching, in which many of the partners had worked together, but also linked to two other Grundtvig projects: Vintage and A.L.I.C.E, and continued the work of all three. The objective was to further respond to the need for teachers to be specially trained for adult education. This implies a fundamental shift in the roles of both teachers and learners towards adopting peer and cooperative education and building learning materials different from what the publishing market supplies for young students. The main field of application was adult education to meet one of the eight key competencies of the Council of Europe (the “learning to learn” for permanent education) and the main addressees were adult educators mostly engaged in VET school institutions, whose competences always need refreshment through the experimentation of new pedagogical methods, the use of ICTs and the design of teaching materials which can better suit their learning audience. L2LByTe2 focused on facilitating adult learners’ acquisition of the 21st century skills: particularly, creativity, adaptability, expression of self and collaboration with others. Being persuaded that adult learners impose on teachers a strongly learner-centred and learner-led educational environment, the partnership worked as a community of practice, which reflected on adults’ learning needs and processes experiencing on themselves. Research and activities were oriented towards: 1. investigating ways and styles of the adult learner perspective, following Malcolm Knowles’s andragogy principles; 2. developing the teacher’s awareness about the fundamental necessity to swap roles, which implies an image of teacher as a “sage in sight”, a guide and a facilitator, but also as a permanent learner him/herself, by linking Jack Mezirow’s transformative learning to Victor Turner’s liminality; 3. exploring family literacy and digital literacy, intergenerational learning and authentic learning to create significant stories. 4. allowing adult learners to create meaningful stories while practicing digital storytelling as a way to make sense of this new approach and introducing Robert Pratten’s model to help learners create multimedia stories; 5. sharing innovative models to assess and evaluate creativity. The L2LByTe2 Intellectual Outputs all aimed at promoting learners’ autonomy in accessing information and in the construction of their own knowledge as well as fostering the capacity to self-evaluate their learning achievements. Storytelling and digital storytelling in particular were favoured as the ideal creative tool to help connecting the learning experience to the learners’ real life (feelings and ideas) and traditions so as to make the triangle of knowledge (education, innovation and research) work even for adults with possibly unsophisticated skills. Cooperation between teacher training university experts and school teaching staff proved particularly fruitful both under the theoretical and practical viewpoints, for both kinds of partners. A mix was created between teachers who teach in formal and non-formal adult education on the one hand and teachers who work in teacher training departments. All the partners have experience in adult education be it in postgraduate trainings, vocational trainings, non-formal community schools. The partnership was formed by 9 members from geographically distant European countries (Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Romania, UK) and from quite different regions in the same country (as Tuscia and Sicily in Italy or Târgoviste and Constanta in Romania). The well-oiled collaboration – also through parallel participation to other Erasmus+ projects – among six of the nine partners made integration of the three partners new to this follow-up project run smoothly. A Short-term Staff Training Week was held round the end of the project: its rich material was collected on the UniTusMoodle platform in the space dedicated to the event while the experiential and critical results were incorporated in the IOs (Master Flipped Class and Guidelines). About twelve trainers from the project teams accompanied about forty trainees from all the European partners including the host organization. Trainers and trainees were university lecturers, school teachers, administrative staff, NGO members, MA programme students as well as secondary school pupils. This initiative guaranteed a first level of impact and dissemination on a local, national and international plane. Further impact will come from the publication and diffusion of the digital products and the application of the methodology to our everyday teaching/learning experiences in the diverse European school systems and adult education programmes. The core idea of the project, modulating the fifth European key-competence as learning to learn through teaching, is already influencing both school and university didactics.