Healthy food choices for a sustainable future Erasmus Project

Project Title

Healthy food choices for a sustainable future

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 vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Health and wellbeing; ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Environment and climate change

Project Summary

The Healthy Food Choices for a Sustainable Future (Healthy Future) project focused on the subjects of healthy food choices, climate change and vegetable enhanced diet and networking between vocational schools and enterprises from the Hotel, Restaurant and Catering industry in different European countries. At the same time the project used new innovative ways to utilize digital tools to enable the learning also for individuals who don’t have a chance to or can’t for some reason study in a classroom (e.g. students with fewer opportunities or learning disabilities, refugees or immigrants without proper language skills or who are illiterate).

The main focus was implementing sustainable development and the use of social media and digital tools in vocational education and training. The objective of this project was to strengthen and broaden catering education to meet the needs of the society and environment. The purpose was to find answer to the question: What needs to be done to minimize the carbon footprint? The more concrete aim was to develop procedures to meet the needs of sustainable development and to produce climate and environment friendly meals. To attract the students to follow these new procedures different kinds of competitions and pop-up restaurant concepts were created. These improved the students’ entrepreneurial skills and help them in the future working life.

The new teaching methods emphasize learning outcomes instead of contents of which only the outlines have been specified. Assessment criteria has been developed by specifying criterion for each learning outcome. This can be seen as an implication of the development of educational technology, e.g. different digital learning environments, social media and mobile devices. This change also relates to the digitalization that penetrates through all the areas of society, to the required new skills and the explosive increase of digital interaction. Together all these changes have a strong impact in teaching and learning processes.Using social media in education contains a new procedure that changes the customary roles of a teacher and students. This new procedure emphasizes sharing, networking, co-operation and co-creation instead of mere individualistic approach. It enables personalized study paths. It derives from the student’s internal motivation and thrives to support his active human agency. It also emphasizes open, non-formal and lifelong learning and changes the assessment criteria.

The use of social media and digital tools in education supports the principals of knowledge building, adaptive expertise and exploratory learning. Open Badges enable making learning and achievements visible. The technology gives the education practitioners the possibility to break the existing barriers between different forms of learning; formal, informal and non-formal. With badges, it is possible to expand recognition of learning outside the formal school setting to all aspects of learners lives.

In the project we produced 38 Open Badges and 4 Meta Open Badges in four different languages (Finnish, English, Italian and Croatian). The Open Badges for Sustainable Development are divided into three categories: ecological sustainable development, food processing and economic sustainable development.

During the project, participating students created 32 climate and environment friendly meals options. These recipes focus also on minimizing the carbon footprint. Based on these recipes we created an eBook that shows consumers climate friendly meal options, and at the same time provides information on climate friendly food consumption. An eGuide was produced to enhance the students’ entrepreneurial skills.

Using different kinds of digital tools and Open Badges makes it easier to take the learning process out of the classroom into the work places. At the same time, it enables the accreditation of prior learning and makes the learning process also more appealing and easy for the youngsters who wouldn’t necessarily be so attracted to the more conventional learning. These new approaches make it also possible for the illiterate or individuals with learning difficulties or with low language skills to learn things they otherwise couldn’t learn. Enhancing the entrepreneurial skills plays a significant role in the future employment and self-employment of the students. The different aspects of social and so called normal entrepreneurship help the students to accommodate themselves in different contexts and makes it easier for them to also adopt to working abroad.

There were five partner organisations from three countries in this project. The Finnish partner Omnia coordinated the project and the consortium of two Croatian partners Centar Slava Raškaj Zagreb and Hotelijersko-Turistička I Ugostiteljska Škola -Zadar HTUŠ, the Italian partner Galileo.it S.r.l. and another Finnish partner Ekami.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 212190 Eur

Project Coordinator

ESPOON SEUDUN KOULUTUSKUNTAYHTYMA OMNIA & Country: FI

Project Partners

• Hotelijersko-turisticka i ugostiteljska skola
• Centar za odgoj i obrazovanje Slava Raskaj Zagreb
• Kotkan-Haminan seudun koulutuskuntayhtymä
• Galileo.it S.r.l.