Science beyond the classroom: undiscovered occupational areas Erasmus Project

Project Title

Science beyond the classroom: undiscovered occupational areas

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 Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Labour market issues incl. career guidance / youth unemployment; Natural sciences; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

Within the project “science beyond the classroom: undiscovered occupational areas”, we wanted young people (who are about to complete their school career) to discover unknown occupational areas within the scientific area. So we did!

Background and motivation of the project are statistics about youth unemployment within the EU, which for example has a rate over 50% in Spain. Shocking enough, but, on the one hand well-educated young students (who were educated for about 12 years in school) are about to start a new period of life and therefore are about to entry into the labor market. On the other hand, especially science-focused employers complain about a lack of skilled employees. To counteract this gap, we’ve set our goal to focus the science beyond the classroom (meaning to expand the content already known to the students from the lessons like chemical reactions, motion, biological diversity and heat) and to discover occupational areas behind these phenomena.
To be able to reach these aims we started a collaboration between schools from Germany, France, Spain and the Czech Republic. The four partners matched two main requirements:

On the one hand, we wanted equal conditions for the participants (linguistic skills regarding the project language English, similar level of education, soon being ready for the labor market), on the other hand we wanted the partners to be unequal regarding the regional labor market through the different regional conditions. Thus, a versatile occupational orientation was made possible, which also captured the importance of an EU-wide labor market.
As a result, we have not only achieved a real and individualized occupational orientation of every single participant, but, e.g. multiplier events and flyers or brochures enlarged the dissemination. Through these materials, the content-related project results are also retained.

Through project implementation, we have counteracted the disorientation and (as a long-term benefit) the tangible risk of youth unemployment for these youths. In addition, young people have recognized the EU as a cohesive and unified labor market, developed their personality in exchange situations and expanded their intercultural and linguistic competences.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 80520 Eur

Project Coordinator

Gymnasium Goetheschule & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Gymnazium Rajec-Jestrebi, o. p. s.
• Lycée Louis Barthou
• IES Hermanos Machado