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Empower students with entrepreneurial skills
Start date: Sep 1, 2015, End date: Aug 31, 2018 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Youth unemployment is an European problem, where 5.2 millions of teenagers make their first decisions wtih an impact on their future life. Most of them regard education as not useful at all as leading them to quit studying and abandon school. Those two issues will be the leitmotifs to be understood and respected. In this context, school should have an important role in developing non formal and informal learning giving expression to multiculturalist attitudes and the construction of personal fulfillment. To help teens make wise and fruitful decisions concerning their lives, we would like to involve students from our schools into the pan-European project called “Empower students with entrepreneurial skills ”. This project emphasises the build of ‘skills for the 21st century’, develop transversal skills such as entrepreneurship and highlights ‘the ability to think critically, take initiative, problem solving and work collaboratively’. These ‘entrepreneurial skills’ should be given particular attention, since they not only help to achieve concrete entrepreneurial activity, but also enhance the employability of young people in each partner´s country and in any European country. The priorities addressed by our project are: (i) Promoting the take-up of practical entrepreneurial experiences in education, training and youth work and (ii) Improving the attainment of young people, particularly those at risk of early school leaving which will be developed by seven schools in seven diverse countries – Portugal, France, England, Italy, Romania, Poland and Finland – whose learning and teaching profiles are different. So we defined four main key-Competences: (i) Raising awareness of cultural and geographical heritage of our regions; (ii) Getting to know the products´ features related to each region’s natural environment; (iii) Becoming acquainted with the local range of industrial, commercial and handicraft associations; (iv) Developing ‘the ability to think critically, take initiative, problem solving and work collaboratively’ through creative entrepreneurship workshops. We believe that the most relevant topics our project deal with are the following: 1) Entrepreneurial learning - entrepreneurship education, 2) Creativity and culture and 3) ICT - new technologies - digital competences. To achieve them we established a mix methodology to develop this project Action-Research. This framework allows us to carry out the project into three action-cycles. Each cycle is strictly related to the going up of the project in the beginning of each new year. Thus we decided to have three transnational project meetings, attended only by school coordinators. To measure the quality of the project we will use different tools to collect data such as questionnaires, surveys and focus group targeted to students, parents, teachers and local community. The main results expected are: (i) Exhibitions of students works concerning to the past and present of their regions for different economic sectors and creativity and entrepreneurship; (ii) Reports on the attitude of students to entrepreneurial activities, the importance of formal education and their needs; (iii) Films, publicity spots, presentations, models, photo albums and posters on the perspectives and news ideas of students in relation to regional development of products or particular economic sectors in their region; (iv) Website for other schools from our areas giving them information on how they can implement similar activities in their schools; (v) Form a group of students and teachers to present/share their knowledge in regional and national schools. As far as dissemination of the project the target groups will be students from different European schools, parents and community since being an entrepreneur in education also involves knowledge and share of good practices at national and international level. School websites, school papers, bulletin boards, exhibitions in school halls, libraries and others areas; Facebook, Etwinning and blogs, will be the internal and external privileged channels used to disseminate the project outcomes, whose the responsible for this phase of the project are the coordinators of each school partner. At the end of the project we look forward to fostering the impact on key-Competences gained by:1. students – independence, discipline, creativity, tolerance and team work skills, creativity and entrepreneurship; Language development and ICT literacy; 2. teachers – language and ICT improvements, team work and problem solving techniques; 3. community – improving cooperation with students’ parents, local authorities and other institutions and enhancing school prestige and popularity; 4. school partners – cooperation, experience, motivation and opportunity to exchange professional experience and good practices.
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