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Building up Entrepreneurial Skills through Reducing Consumption Levels in a Multilingual Way.
Start date: Sep 1, 2014, End date: Aug 31, 2017 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Our project has three main objectives or special areas of interest: * Consume reduction * The fostering of employability skills in students * Update of teaching and learning resources in the foreign language classroom to make them linked to demands of labour market From our everyday practice in the classroom we have observed that the over consumption our students encounter makes them require some specific skills and knowledge in order to analyse relevant information and make sensible choices. Consumers, particularly the youngest ones, should be educated to critically filter messages from the advertising sector and be made aware of the differences between real and perceived needs. Consumer education is indeed one of the main topics of this project. It is also an important vehicle for building the confidence needed by consumers to operate in increasingly complex markets. In fact, the 2009 OECD’s committee recommended that “consumer education should begin at an early age and cover all life stages; it should be incorporated into educational programmes for lifelong learning or school curriculum, where appropriate”. Teachers in the partner schools have already tried to implement consumer education in their schools through interdisciplinary lessons. We would like to share our experiences and continue work within the school communities in our five countries. Surprisingly as it may seem, this consumerist society is embedded in one of the worst economic recessions it has known and unfortunatelly for all students and our society, educational plans do not contribute to teach children basic home economics and employability skills. We all think -and as it has been proved in numerous market research- that these "soft skills" (oral communicative ability in at least two languages, creativity, innovation, competivity, flexibility, motivation, ability to influence other people and ability to take risks) are not only key for employers whenever they look for employees, but they are in many cases more relevant than the knowledge students have acquired through their University degrees. Unfortunatelly, none of the associated schools tackle these employability skills in their educational programmes. We are determined to fill this gap in our institutions. This will be the second topic in this association and we would like to approach it as liked to consumer education. Activities would be done by mixed international groups of students who will be encouraged to work using as many foreign languages as possible in their interaction. In fact, our third key aspect in this partnership is to make students realise the importance that learning foreign languages have so as to broaden their own opportunities in the labour market. In order to motivate pupils, teachers will be encouraged to implement innovative teaching and learning resources and methods in the foreign language classroom integrating the use of of ITC tools in their everyday practice and exchanging good practices between foreign language teachers in all participating schools, in which better links to a more practical use of language skills required by the labour market will be specially developed. This multilingual interaction will extend the European dimension of the partner schools and cooperation between students and teachers. In consequence, knowledge about the partner countries and the European Union will increase and many stereotypes will be broken. Closely linked to this European dimension is the long term mobility of students we apply for, as we want to compare working systems in all schools (especially in foreign language teaching and CLIL) and design common recognition systems for formal and informal learning that students will acquire in other countries, where they will be evaluated by host tutors in the visited country using evaluation and recognition tools designed by all of us as a team and easyly applied to any student participating in such experiences. We would like to do so instead of the traditional "at a distance evaluation" traditionally carried out by the sending tutors and home teachers who would mark those students according to the parametrers established in the home countries which would certainly lead to a non complete integration of the student. These mobilities will increase the internationalization of our schools and will contribute enormously to our coorperation providing school with a distinctive quality sign. We have designed a realistic and complete dissemination plan along the project and afterwards and hope to influence third parts, such as local businesses, Chambers of Commerce adn teacher training centres as the three objectives are of key importance in our society and countries.

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