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Interdisciplinarity - a Must-have Approach for a Quality Professional Training in Tourism
Start date: Dec 1, 2015, End date: Nov 30, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

In the context of Romania’s openness towards Europe, the local, regional and national development strategies also aim at improving tourism, by means of attracting as many tourists as possible. In order to turn this strategy into reality, the premises for putting it into practice must be created. From this perspective, it is absolutely necessary to improve the quality of professional competences of the future employees in the tourism sector and to adapt these competences to European and even global requirements. By organizing some practical training periods for 14 students from Tourism (in the 10th and the 11th grade), and for 10 teachers specialized in this field or connected to the professional development in it, we believe we shall meet the main objective of this project: a higher quality of professional training offered by “Virgil Madgearu” Technological Economic High School (LTEVM), in order to meet the demands of the employers in this sector. Nowadays, it can be easily observed that the employers and the heads of travel agencies or hotels expect specific competences from their employees, competences which would lead to a smoother adaptation of the touristic packages and services so they could fit the client’s needs and options. There are a few development paths in tourism, such as: cultural and historical, religious, adventure tourism, tourism, business. All these possible directions involve some complementary competences for those working in the travel industry, such as: History, Geography, Religion, Entrepreneurship and foreign languages. In the development of the project “Interdisciplinarity – a Must-have approach for a Quality Professional Training in Tourism” we wish to organize a training period of 19 days for our students, in travel agencies and famous hotels in Cappadocia, Turkey. This is one of the favourite destinations for tourists around the world, due to the quality and the complexity of the service they provide in the region. Consequently, this training period will place students in a real-work context in agencies which promote interdisciplinary travel packages (they promote touristic attractions of great cultural, historical, religious, geographical or geological significance). This will also contribute to illustrating how encouraging entrepreneurship may lead to success in travel services and, in addition, it will offer the chance of practicing and improving the participants’ English skills, as the tourists come here from all over the world. The mobility for teachers will allow a good-practice transfer and an exemplification of combining specific competences from different fields to ensure success in the tourism sector; for Cappadocia represents one of the most relevant examples of such a fact. The good-practice exchange will be achieved by means of the working schedule – the diverse activities will take place in a wide range of educational institutions of different levels (comprehensive/private, high school/higher education, formal/ non-formal), local authorities and economic agents. After the development of the project activities, new professional competences will be gained and these will be certified by Europass documents and participation certificates (both for students and teachers). The mobility for students will contribute to gathering experience in the work field, to acquiring solid professional training, thus facilitating fast employment on the labour market and development of the tourism sector. Regarding the participant teachers, they will be encouraged to be innovative in their teaching of Tourism, by devising lessons and didactical materials with interdisciplinary character, based on the experience and good practice examples learnt from the partner institutions in Cappadocia. Another objective aimed at through the implementation of this project is promoting among students and teachers European values concerning tolerance, intercultural communication, equality of chances, openness towards other religions and nations, all these actually representing specific professional competences in the Tourism field. Publishing the methodological guide made by the participant teachers in the mobility (containing lesson plans, teaching materials, interdisciplinary educational resources applied in the specialized curriculum for Tourism, for the 10th and 11th grade) and pointing out the solutions which are already successfully implemented in Cappadocia will contribute to the dissemination of the results and the good practice transfer. This will happen not only at the level of LTEVM, but also at a local, regional and national level. The impact which we aim at is promoting openness towards Interdisciplinarity as a solution for increased quality of professional training in Tourism and a steady development of this sector in Romania. We hope that this partnership will continue the tradition of collaboration of LTEVM within European projects and it will be successfully repeated years to come.

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