Open The Doors - New Directions in NEET prevention “Teachers cannot teach how to be entrepreneurial without themselves being entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurial competency and skills can be acquired or built only through hands-on, real life learning experiences.” Commission, Entrepreneurship Education: A Guide for Educators, 2013 NEET youth is becoming one of the most important challenges to the European societies and increasingly will be. Drop-out and early school leaving will increase, as schools are falling more and more behind the cultures of 21st century youth. Most NEET prevention measures are based on the unfortunate assumption that potential NEETs are not able to learn, to work intellectually or to develop educational or labour market relevant competences. This is why most of these settings are based on a practical and manual work. Ironically this means that NEET prevention can result in learning prevention. Potential NEET youth and NEET youth are indeed able to develop strong intellectual and learning capacity, given the proper opportunities and learning settings. It is an important element in the open the doors to community didactics to break through this inertia of depressed mentality in NEET prevention environments – including all levels of those environments – by inviting different kinds of players from other sectors, and with different mentalities, to join and engage in the projects and activities created with and for the youth groups. To create new capacity in NEET preventions to support the learning of 21st century competences among the young people, Open the Doors needs to address and work with the professional staff in these settings, mostly teachers, social educators and youth educators. The educational professionals are the gatekeepers of innovative didactics, allowing potential NEETs to re-engage in learning and initiative-taking. Therefore Open the Doors is missioned to create new didactics for NEET prevention THROUGH building 21st century didactic capacity among the professionals. IN CONCISE FORM THE PROJECT WILL BUILD 21ST CENTURY NEET PREVENTION CAPACITY AMONG NEET PREVENTION EDUCATORS THROUGH ENGAGING THEM IN CONCRETE PROJECTS WITH THE YOUNG TEAMS AND THE COMMUNITY, BASED ON THE PROJECT’S 5 FUTURE-ORIENTED METHODOLOGIES: REAL-LIFE LEARNING, LEARNING IN MIXED REALITIES, WORKING WITH COMMUNITY, ENTREPRENEURIAL INITIATIVE-TAKING AND USING CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY. The capacity building of the educators will result from the interaction between such practical experimentation and the collective reflections systematically included in the project. The DOCUMENTATION of project’s extensive capacity building among participating educators will generate NEW KNOWLEDGE, on which the project’s final outcomes will be based – offering rich didactic guidance to a wider audience of NEET prevention educators across Europe. In summary the objectives pursued by Open the Doors therefore are: - To create new capacity in NEET preventions by working with the professional staff in the prevention provisions, mostly teachers, social educators and youth workers - To innovate in the didactics of NEET prevention by applying the 21st century entrepreneurial learning, linking the youth interest with the community needs and creating practical learning processes - To build capacity among NEET to re-engage in learning, community and work - To link this new experience to the education institutions responsible for training the new generations of teachers and youth workers - To upgrade the recognition of the NEET prevention institutions - To produce experienced based documentation to share among education institutions in order to unify the criteria in NEED prevention Open the Doors builds on and offers 3 major pillars of innovation: - Teachers’ competence development through the dialectics of practical real-life experimentation and systematic collective reflection and documentation - Developing and producing future-oriented 21st century re-engagement didactics for potential NEET youth, reversing the traditional practical and manual learning pitfalls - Creating open virtual guidance for wider European audiences directly based on knowledge generated by the project practice and co-created by the participating educators and youth teams NEET prevention settings and NEET prevention educators thus need to open the doors to dramatically new and future-oriented didactics based on: REAL-LIFE LEARNING 21ST CENTURY LEARNING METHODS IN MIXED REALITIES WORKING WITH THE COMMUNITY ENTREPRENEURIAL MIND-SETTING AND INITIATIVE-TAKING CREATIVE TECHNOLOGY The project’s NEET prevention didactics innovation will materialize into the following key results: Guidelines for 21st century NEET prevention Are you a NEET prevention worker? European NEET Prevention Guidance Service What NEET prevention NEED Funding NEET prevention facilities? The Open the Doors hand-out collection Are NEETs not able to learn? Why not ask them?