Working Culture 2.0 Erasmus Project

Project Title

Working Culture 2.0

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 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

During 2009-2011, South Savo Vocational College coordinated a Comenius project called Working Culture. In this project some students made video clips at work places, and those clips aroused great interest. This is why we came up with the idea of using the well-appreciated Comenius project in the background and develop a new project named Working Culture 2, this time focusing in video-making in order to make the differences in working cultures in European countries more visible for both the makers and the audiences of the final output of the project, but also in order to obtain many other goals: increased quality of teaching in ICT, media and languages; increased cooperation between teachers in different departments; increased quality and relevance of cultural training; increased enthusiasm in creating educational open source material among the teaching staff of our schools.
Five colleges in five different European countries took part in this project. The coordinator of the project was South Savo Vocational College in Finland and the other partners were Terézvárosi Kereskedelmi és Közgazdasági Szakközépiskola és Szakiskola in Hungary, Agrupamento de Escolas de Esgueira in Portugal, IIS EINSTEIN-NEBBIA in Italy and Max Eyth Schule, Alsfeld in Germany. All partners are vocational colleges with good relations with working life. All the project partners have worked together in previous international projects, if not in the first WoCu, then in other projects. In each partner college, a group of both teachers and students was tool part in the project work. Teachers of different subjects took part of project: ICT, media, marketing/customer service, entrepreneurship, languages. In that way, we fostered the provision and the assessment of key-competences, including basic skills and transversal skills particularly entrepreneurship, languages and digital skills, and increase labor market relevance in learning.
The rationale of the project was to make students working together to study and compare the working cultures in their countries. In their countries, the students made video clips at nine different situations in normal work life. During transnational meetings, the students worked in multinational groups and plan and compare the video clips they had shot in their own countries. The purpose of the video was to show whether there are cultural differences for example when approaching a customer or addressing a superior. Videos were uploaded to YouTube.
The main output of the project was series of videos telling about cultural differences in working situations in five European countries. The videos consist of chosen, culturally relevant situations taking place at work places. These situations are meeting new colleagues, meeting the boss first time, making an appointment, business meeting, apologizing for being late, handling a complaint, negotiation with the boss and dinner with the boss.
The individual scenes filmed by students in each of the participating countries. Before each learning events student prepare some material new videos or reshot previous. During learning events videos were checked. The videos are used as an OER teaching material. They can be exploited and developed into further teaching material. The videos can be used in cultural preparation at schools, during language, IT, customer service, entrepreneurship and media lessons as well as in disseminating the project.
Since this project was not only about outputs but also new methods of learning and teaching, using new technologies and ways to communicate with partner colleges in different countries, it is relevant to say that after the project funding is over, our institutions are more ready to use these methods and ways of learning and teaching in everyday life, not just with the special projects. Since all these issues – new learning methods, using ICT in teaching, increasing international cooperation – are written in the project partners’ strategies and development plans, the things developed in this project are now maintained by our institutions.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 134985 Eur

Project Coordinator

Etelä-Savon Koulutus Oy & Country: FI

Project Partners

• Agrupamento de Escolas de Esgueira
• Max Eyth Schule Alsfeld
• Budapesti Gazdasági Szakképzési Centrum Terézvárosi Kereskedelmi és Közgazdasági Szakgimnáziuma és Szakközépiskolája
• IIS EINSTEIN-NEBBIA