Tourism is an integral part of European economies and educational fields of study throughout Europe focus on the preparation of students for the real work in tourism industry. However, practical ways of preparing the complex tourism product are neglected because of the time schedule of the school curricula and due to lack of activities in the school environment. This project will help the participating students with the development of their abilities to prepare the complex tourism product and realize it in a real environment by sharing it with other the participants as tourists from various foreign countries – the project school partners. It will contribute to better versatility of the students in the tourism labour market. The main aims of the TRIP project are focused on the entrepreneurial learning - entrepreneurship education, the world cultural heritage, the social inclusion and the 21st-century skills. The participants will improve their awareness of the European cultural and natural heritage based on the visits. The entrepreneurship will be promoted among young people and the participants will implement the social inclusion in practice. They will improve the 21st-century skills such as collaboration and co-operation, communication, critical thinking, information, media and technology skills and, ultimately, life and career skills, leadership, flexibility and social skills. Team work of the students will represent the basis of the project success. There will be 100 students (14 – 18 years old) participating in the short-term exchanges of pupils and 50 accompanying persons and there will be involved 21 teachers in teachers´ L/T/T activities. The project will involve students from the disadvantaged families, be it single-parent families, low-income families or students with special needs, including the handicapped ones in various forms. The teachers will be selected according to their linguistic, specific and ICT competences and for their certified experiences on similar issues. Students will guide other students and learn by doing, e.g. a simulation of a TRIP Travel agencythat will result in variety of complex tourism products which will be a good practice for other European schools. Each project partner will prepare the itinerary of the L/T/T for the duration of 5 days. This will include the proposal of workshops, sights, means of travel, costs/budget, time schedule or guiding. The mentioned itinerary will be created with respect to the standard offer of a travel agency aiming at the incoming tourists. The short-term exchanges of groups of pupils will be focused on the most prevalent and the most basic forms of tourism: cultural and sightseeing tourism, sport and adventure tourism, medical and spa tourism, rural and ecological tourism, recreational tourism. The forms of tourism will be presented to the participants by various tourism organizations during workshops. Visits to UNESCO World Heritage Monuments will be also included . It was selected in coherence with the main focus of the EU for the recent time period. Every short-term exchange of groups of pupils will be pointing (besides the main topic) also at the preparation of a tourist guide including: Topographic preparation, Itinerary of a Tour, Planning the Budget, Psychological preparation and Evaluation of a Tour. Dissemination of the project results and outputs will be arranged by project webpage, social networks and channels which will make the student work more visible, attractive and appreciated. The development of tourism and further project impact will be realized with the help of local travel agencies and tourism entities. The overall project output will be a printed TRIP heritage guide of the visited countries including the texts in partner languages with own photos. Promotional videos will be created and offered to the national/regional tourist boards of every project partner. A guide handbook describing various expert topics mentioned above will be a part of outputs. Another part of project activities will be two events Mini-Fair of Tourism and Social Inclusion TRIP which will be organized in every partner country as a form of dissemination on a regional and, if possible, on a national level. The partners will share good pedagogical practices, they will learn how to use the project-based, problem-based and entrepreneurs learning. They will include the world heritage topics in the school curricula. Created project outputs will be useful in geography, history or tourism-related subjects. This material will be also helpful for various tourism organizations. Language teachers and their students will implement the multilingual tourism vocabulary in their lessons. Students and their teachers will improve essential life skills and the 21st-century skills. The students will learn good manners and how to collaborate with the disadvantaged.
The project Travelling Raises an Inclusive Partnership (TRIP) was focused on project-based learning (PBL) and entrepreneur learning (EL). The partner schools set up a training tour operator (TO) and prepared products and brokered tourism services. The students tried the profession of a guide. All exchanges were prepared by the TRIP TO, and its members guided the pupils from the partner schools. Project activities were focused on UNESCO heritage. Pupils gained their knowledge through their work and activity, and at the same time, they developed 21st-century skills. They learned how to manage the TO, manage the finances allocated to each project activity, and promote their product. Pupils, but also teachers, improved their language skills. They improved their financial and information literacy, organizational, and IT skills. The project partners were from different parts of the world and from different cultural, religious, and social backgrounds, which reinforced the possibilities of social inclusion. The cooperation with the special support team was particularly strengthened. School psychologists, special pedagogues, pedagogical assistants, and teacher´s assistants were actively involved in the selection process and at the same time in the preparation of inclusive tours. Thanks to the project, pupils with different kinds of disadvantages were included, such as participants from areas and towns with limited public transport, students with learning difficulties (dyslexia, dysgraphia), and low school performance in English (pupils guided during excursions in English), participants from families with low living standards, health problems and disabilities (the Asperger Syndrome). In the area of social inclusion, the project made a positive contribution to the educational approach of teachers. The involvement of teachers has been professionally improved through new attitudes and the exchange of good practices in education from their colleagues in different countries. The project results are publicly available on the project website:https://triperasmusplus.eu/. The publications were created as a flipbook for online users and distributed as printed copies, as well. The handbook for tourist guides in EN is a manual on how to create a tour. The UNESCO brochure of partner countries is available in EN, but also in each of the partners’ languages and Catalan. Most of the photographs in the brochure were taken by participants in short-term activities. The multilingual dictionary explains the most common concepts associated with the guide activity in EN. It includes translation into all languages of the partners and Catalan. Promotional videos were made for travel agents to promote each partner country. Mini-fair of tourism held in each country was realized thanks to the cooperation with local tourism organizations. The event aimed to promote the project and disseminate its results, including the promotion of the cultural and natural heritage of each partner country at the regional or national level. The itineraries in EN include an agenda/program for each L/T/T activity. All of the lesson plans were created in English, but also in the partners' mother tongue. Project topics were included in school curricula. Lesson plans are available on the project website in doc format, allowing users to customize them for individual teaching purposes around the world. At the local level, each TRIP TO prepared a trip for disadvantaged participants based on social inclusion. Other, unplanned, products, available on YouTube channels and the project website, were also created. The Handbook, Dictionary, Videos, and UNESCO brochure are useful as teaching materials for subjects such as English or another foreign language, Tourism in English, Technology of tourism services, Guide services, Tourism Economics, Tourism Geography, Geography, History, and History of arts. The developed didactic aids can also be useful for other schools in the above-mentioned lessons, and also for organizations providing professional courses of the guide. Thanks to the lectures of experts from the Catholic University in Ružomberk, we obtained valuable information about how to implement PBL and EL in the teaching process. The model of training TO may be a good example of EL and PBL good practice for other schools. Promotion activities and cooperation with local tourist organizations, parents, local primary and secondary schools, and the general public were particularly beneficial. They helped to increase the visibility of partner countries at local levels as potential tourist destinations. Participating tourism organizations obtained the appropriate types to carry out their tours. If the project partners were unable to participate in the activity, they were connected online via video / live streams, and applications. It can be concluded that despite the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing war conflicts, we managed to meet all the project objectives.