Extending and developing educators' competencesVIC stands for Validating Integration Competences of refugees and is a two-year European project funded by the Programme Erasmus+ and coordinated by the German partner DVV – Deutscher Volkshochschulverband. The project will be implemented by a consortium of six partners from five European countries: Germany, Italy, Greece, France and Austria, between December 2017 and November 2019.The project intends to develop an approach to measure the effectiveness of the educational offers that have been put in place with the aim at easing immigrants’ pathways to integration into the labour market and society in large, on the one hand, and to assess their impact on the individual integration competences of the immigrants, on the other hand.
At its core the project aims at improving adult educators’ competencies to plan, enhance and validate the “integration competence” of refugee immigrants in diverse educational integration programmes. This core aim has a strong inclusion aspect: “Integration competence”, in the project for the first time operationalized at a European level, is a set of social, civic, intercultural competences absolutely necessary to start a successful social and professional life in a new country. In the integration programmes refugee immigrants have to effectively and efficiently learn the basic processes, rules, and values of the host society. With the help of the VIC system this competence development process can be more systematically planned and implemented. Secondly, the project follows a strict learning-outcome oriented approach, which allows for competence assessment. By defining “integration competence” with the help of the Level5 system with three dimensions – cognition, actions, values – along five quality levels – from beginner to competent expert - a well tested and innovative validation procedure is introduced to education for integration. The refugee immigrants and the integration agencies will benefit alike: The former their competence and make it visible, which increases their personal motivation and helps to integrate, while at organisational level the effectiveness and impact of (publicly financed) education programmes can be better accounted for. Thirdly, the acquisition of the VIC validation system is an important increase of professional competence on behalf of the adult educators working with refugee immigrants. This is an important quality step, as many integration programmes have just sprung up as a quick response to the wave of incoming refugees in the past two years. The VIC blended learning course will be a sustainable continuing professional education offer for adult educators in the years coming.
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17/9/2019 5 Comments Reconstructing an Environment for continuing professional development and Validation for Educators in Adult LearningAims and scope of an international, interdisciplinary and intersectoral community of experts working in adult education
REVEAL is a European Educational Network for Competence Oriented Learning and Validation. It has been developed since 2005 and currently consists of institutions and individuals from 22 European Member States, including universities, European umbrella organisations, educational institutions, schools, vocational training institutions and various non-governmental organisations from different sectors. REVEAL is also the name of an ERASMUS+ project; the acronyme stands for “Reconstructing an Environment for continuing professional development and Validation for Educators in Adult Learning”. It helps us to mainstream our approaches and instruments and to set up a quality approach and professionalisation approach for adult educationalists all over Europe. The REVEAL project focuses on Erasmus+ KA1 courses for Adult Educators. It seeks to make the European course offers visible and comparable in the neutral EQF system (European Qualification Framework). At the same time the project provides an attractive marketing system for these courses. On the one hand REVEAL aims to the transparency and recognition of skills and qualifications, indeed the LEVEL5 approach allows to assess, visualise and validate (through certification) the competences acquired in informal and non-formal learning. Such approach is in line with the EQF taxonomy and it is easily connectable to the ECVET system and to EUROPASS. On the other hand, REVEAL aims to the achievement of relevant and high quality skills and competences for adult educators since it will develop a fully-fledged European qualification for educational professionals regarding Competence Oriented Learning and Validation (COL&V). Through the REVEAL qualification, KA1 course providers will be able to adopt a quality approach based on the GINCO criteria, and to apply validation of informal and non-formal learning (VINFL) and competence oriented learning (COL) with all relevant topics. Also, they will practically train their skills and develop their competences when developing unit and learning outcome descriptions, relating appropriate assessment methods to the learning situations and working on quality criteria when rating and documenting competence developments both in ECVET and in LEVEL5 taxonomy. Practically, adult educators will have access to high quality learning and teaching materials for their professionalization that can be used without legal copyright issues (OER). Each course provider can allocate its courses into this system and the provided courses will be described with a competenceoriented approach. In this way, REVEAL seeks to make the European course offers visible and comparable in the neutral EQF system. As a result, adult educators will have an easier access to high quality Continuing Professional Development (CPD) courses available Europe-wide. Therefore, the REVAL project, especially through the European qualification for the Professionalization of educational professionals regarding COL&V and its implementation strategy will strongly contribute to the professionalization of educational personnel in adult education and will ensure a quality check for KA1 courses based on European standards. |
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