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Melle-Melle
Start date: Jul 1, 2014, End date: Jun 30, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Our school is eager to offer its students possibilities to grow, both in their scholastic career as in their further career in a workplace environment. We are aware that this can be accomplished by respectively applying activating teaching methods and by developing competences in line with the needs of the corporate world. Offering our students an international internship of two weeks as an administrative assistant is by far the most ideal way of obtaining the curriculum objectives of our Office Management course. The added value of an internship in a French speaking corporate environment, lies within meeting the growing demand for multilingual employees by our Belgian companies. Due to the bilingual reality of Belgian commerce and the globalization in general, firms tend to add a lot of value to multilingualism in regard to recruiting new employees. Furthermore, our students will acquire new insights in the French corporate world and will broaden their horizons. As to contextualizing this in an European Project, this will only ameliorate European bonds and boost cultural tolerance. In regard to this project, our students of our Office management course are our main targets. They often suffer from weariness regarding attending school and frequently deal with issues concerning the course itself. By offering them an international traineeship, they consciously sign up for this specific course and they feel appreciated in their personality and scholastic profile. The project Melle- Melle offers us the possibility to continue our current course of international partnerships. A previous project, quite similar in goals and objectives, was received well and was published as an example of ‘good practice’ in the booklet issued in the light of the 18th anniversary of Leonardo Da Vinci In Flanders. The positive evaluation of this project, by all parties involved, led to the idea of relaunching this project and adjust it where needed. The collaboration with partners is based upon earlier partnerships. The content of the internship is thoroughly prepared and drawn up in cooperation with the companies involved in the trainee programme. This way all parties involved know what is expected of them and are aware of the objectives to obtain. During the past two years, we gave the opportunity to aproximately 20 of our students to do an internship as administrative assistant in an organization or company in Melle, France. These companies/organizations are part of the social/public sector: city hall, library, tourist office, public hospital, …. The students stay in host families. That way, the integration in French culture and immersion in the French language is complete and absolute. Additionally, they participate in a number of organized activities (excursions during the weekend, sports, cultural activities…). Besides working as an administrative assistant, they also show their sales skills by promoting and selling Flemish local produce during the local weekly fair in Melle, France. There’s no question about the impact of this project on the success rate of our students and we therefore hope to counter the current tendency of juvenile unemployment. Furthermore, we want to motivate our office management students and contribute to a realistic but healthy and positive self-image. Additionally, this project gives all participants a chance to work on their language skills, and thus improving them. This has a positive effect on the students, as well as the teachers and the school itself. With this project we also gave a professional opportunity to two teachers, teaching subjects in these corporate-oriented courses (Office Management and Communication, Office and Retail). They got the chance to gain practical experience and know-how by doing internships themselves. We prefer working with the same partners in this respect, because of practical reasons. That way, the teachers involved were able to adjust their own competences or even obtain new skills and thus improved their own teaching methods. Furthermore, we hope that in the future we will be able to offer even more students the possibility of a foreign internship (e.g. students of the Retail /Office course and the Logistics course) and that these experiences will also have a positive effect on our CLIL-project.

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