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Educational Innovation facing Youth Unemployment
Start date: Sep 1, 2014, End date: Sep 1, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

EiYoU - Educational Innovation facing Youth is a two year project that will empower students and teachers to cope with the negative impacts of youth unemployment in learning and schooling. There is an emergency across Europe to decrease the rates of youth unemployment and to early school leaving. These two are connected as the lower expectations and disbelieving in education reinforce school drop out and this is a condition for less employment opportunities. Therefore, there is: - the need to motivate students to take over their future, instead of being threatened by the actual conditions; - the need to deliver coping strategies and resilience competence to this generation, in order to face their professional path in a positive and entrepreneurial way; - the need to distribute among schools, alternative and captivating learning/teaching methods that encourage teachers and students , and, at the same time, support a positive school climate; - the need to stop early school leaving because of demotivation and disbelieve in education. The aim of EiYoU! is to bring together a cross-sectoral partnership, which includes schools, private companies, a NGO and a youth association, to develop a catalog of innovative solutions to address these needs. The methodology is based on the experiences of each school and each teacher, in a bottom-up approach, and includes national and transnational co-creation workshops, short therm exchanges of students, research and pilot interventions in schools and evaluation of impact. Some specific methods towards innovation include prototyping, design thinking, creative learning, hackathon techniques, Edu on Tour and Montessori motivational strategies. The project directly involves a variety of groups: -18 researchers and developers; - 70 teachers as co-creators of educational prototypes of classroom interventions; - 30 students directly enrolled in the mobilities and 80 students who participate in the virtual exchanges and in pilot interventions. - Educational Authorities, such as regional directorships and municipality education councils. - 12 other local stakeholders - employment services, counseling and vocational orientation services, social assistance, active citizenship programmes for youth, youth associations,... The project will achieve 7 Intellectual Outputs, including research reports and implementation resources (info-kit, crowdsourcing platform). From those the most relevant output for distribution and sustainability will be the Catalogue of Educational Innovation. Furthermore, main results will be intangible changes in the participants´ - teachers and students - attitude towards school. They will exit the experiences with a positive mind set for educational effort: students will get more motivated to participate in educational activities (formal and informal), gaining more confidence in using the contents of those activities in creative ways in their life. This competence will prepare them to challenge the "after school life" with positive expectations and more concrete professional orientation. Teachers will be empowered to change the classroom model of teaching, by integrating creative and meaningful learning activities. They will also "learn" on how to produce such innovation, by collaborating with others around them or within the global network (crowdsourcing). By the end of EiYoU! we hope to reduce the drop-out, the discouragement, lower achievement and apathy in the participating schools. In long term the reuse, adaptation and multiplication of these methods will contribute to reach early school leaving rates of 10% or less, supporting the goals of Europe 2020.
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