Learning to Learn by Teaching 2 Erasmus Project

Project Title

Learning to Learn by Teaching 2

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for adult education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning

Project Summary

Learning to Learn By Teaching 2 built on the Grundtvig project Learning to Learn by Teaching, in which many of the partners had worked together, but also linked to two other Grundtvig projects: Vintage and A.L.I.C.E, and continued the work of all three. The objective was to further respond to the need for teachers to be specially trained for adult education. This implies a fundamental shift in the roles of both teachers and learners towards adopting peer and cooperative education and building learning materials different from what the publishing market supplies for young students. The main field of application was adult education to meet one of the eight key competencies of the Council of Europe (the “learning to learn” for permanent education) and the main addressees were adult educators mostly engaged in VET school institutions, whose competences always need refreshment through the experimentation of new pedagogical methods, the use of ICTs and the design of teaching materials which can better suit their learning audience.

L2LByTe2 focused on facilitating adult learners’ acquisition of the 21st century skills: particularly, creativity, adaptability, expression of self and collaboration with others. Being persuaded that adult learners impose on teachers a strongly learner-centred and learner-led educational environment, the partnership worked as a community of practice, which reflected on adults’ learning needs and processes experiencing on themselves. Research and activities were oriented towards:
1. investigating ways and styles of the adult learner perspective, following Malcolm Knowles’s andragogy principles;
2. developing the teacher’s awareness about the fundamental necessity to swap roles, which implies an image of teacher as a “sage in sight”, a guide and a facilitator, but also as a permanent learner him/herself, by linking Jack Mezirow’s transformative learning to Victor Turner’s liminality;
3. exploring family literacy and digital literacy, intergenerational learning and authentic learning to create significant stories.
4. allowing adult learners to create meaningful stories while practicing digital storytelling as a way to make sense of this new approach and introducing Robert Pratten’s model to help learners create multimedia stories;
5. sharing innovative models to assess and evaluate creativity.

The L2LByTe2 Intellectual Outputs all aimed at promoting learners’ autonomy in accessing information and in the construction of their own knowledge as well as fostering the capacity to self-evaluate their learning achievements. Storytelling and digital storytelling in particular were favoured as the ideal creative tool to help connecting the learning experience to the learners’ real life (feelings and ideas) and traditions so as to make the triangle of knowledge (education, innovation and research) work even for adults with possibly unsophisticated skills.

Cooperation between teacher training university experts and school teaching staff proved particularly fruitful both under the theoretical and practical viewpoints, for both kinds of partners. A mix was created between teachers who teach in formal and non-formal adult education on the one hand and teachers who work in teacher training departments. All the partners have experience in adult education be it in postgraduate trainings, vocational trainings, non-formal community schools. The partnership was formed by 9 members from geographically distant European countries (Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Romania, UK) and from quite different regions in the same country (as Tuscia and Sicily in Italy or Târgoviste and Constanta in Romania). The well-oiled collaboration – also through parallel participation to other Erasmus+ projects – among six of the nine partners made integration of the three partners new to this follow-up project run smoothly.

A Short-term Staff Training Week was held round the end of the project: its rich material was collected on the UniTusMoodle platform in the space dedicated to the event while the experiential and critical results were incorporated in the IOs (Master Flipped Class and Guidelines). About twelve trainers from the project teams accompanied about forty trainees from all the European partners including the host organization. Trainers and trainees were university lecturers, school teachers, administrative staff, NGO members, MA programme students as well as secondary school pupils. This initiative guaranteed a first level of impact and dissemination on a local, national and international plane. Further impact will come from the publication and diffusion of the digital products and the application of the methodology to our everyday teaching/learning experiences in the diverse European school systems and adult education programmes. The core idea of the project, modulating the fifth European key-competence as learning to learn through teaching, is already influencing both school and university didactics.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 149626 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DELLA TUSCIA & Country: IT

Project Partners

• Colegiul Tehnic Energetic
• Istituto d’Istruzione Secondaria Superiore Sciascia e Bufalino
• Agrupamento de Escolas Tomaz Pelayo, Santo Tirso
• Shared Enterprise CIC
• Vest-Lofoten videregående skole
• COLEGIUL ECONOMIC ION GHICA
• UC LIMBURG