Basic ideas of the project: The role of Adult learning for social inclusion and integration
The key objective of any educational system is to equip people with a wide range of skills and competences for them to be able to lead self-determined and well functional lives as active parts in the society they inhabit.
However with the extremely rapid changes all societies and the work markets have faced in the past decades this task has become extremely complex and challenging. The rate of change makes traditional ideas of a set amount of years of education leading up to a specific permanent employment within a certain field, in many cases unrealistic. With many traditional places of employment within the industry sector getting digitalised, many formerly manual tasks being automised, and the employment market becoming increasingly concentrated on work within the sectors of service and digital development, more and more people find their previous place within the work market disappearing.There are a lot less stable places of work – less permanent or life-long employments, and much more work places offered only on temporary or project base. People within most professional fields are now required to continuously aquire new skills, knowledge and competencies throughout their professional life in order to keep their work.
The new state of the work market requires a high readiness from people to learn and adapt to changing structures, situations and demands. In addition to this there are the challenges created through an increased flow of migration – especially through people forced to leave their country of origin due to political and social conflicts, or environmental and financial difficulties. Migrants are often a specifically vulnerable and
disadvantaged group. Apart from having the challenge of learning a new language, and the explicit and implicit rules of the new social and cultural context, they also often have to fight with prejudice, suspicions and discrimination on all different levels. Many migrants also arrive with competencies and knowledge gathered through work and education in their country of origin that to different levels might not be easy to translate or adapt to the new context. People arriving from countries where armed conflicts or social and financial difficulties have disrupted their possibility to go to
school, also face the challenge of catching up on the missed years of education.
Taking all of these social factors and changes into consideration, we see that adult learning has become vital in today’s society. People need to have the opportunity to continuously learn the new methods and competencies needed for their area of work, or gather the knowledge needed to reorient themselves in new professional directions in order to stay employable on the everchanging and demanding work market. And especially people from disadvantaged groups need to have the support and encouragement to gather the skills needed to get a work, to advance, and also
generally be able take part and play an active role in society.
About the project
Integration through Social and Digital Learning (ISDL) is a transnational project funded through the EU program Erasmus+.
The project focuses on the situation of migrant population and unemployed in different countries, and grows out of the belief that successful social inclusion and integration is dependant on the availability of intensive adult learning pathways promoting specifically cultural sensitivity and digital literacy.
We believe that there are many important innovative approaches to this form of adult learning already existing, and that we can all profit a lot from seeing what is working well in other countries and contexts. The aim of the project is therefore to seek out examples of good practices from NGOs, organisations and initiatives, that have developed creative and well-working methods and schemes for integration.
The end goal is to put together a collection of in-depth descriptions of the
best examples found through our research, to be made available as an Open Educational Resource.
Our project is aimed at anyone working within adult education with a focus on migrants and unemployed. Through this project we are hoping to be able to offer new inspiration, ideas and impulses for the educational activities they are offering.
About us and the work
We are 6 project partners – organisations from Italy, Romania, Turkey, Poland and Germany – researching together, sharing our knowledge, and reflecting on our experiences both through transnational meetings and over digital communication plattforms. During the two-year duration of the project (2017-2019) each project partner will be collecting data and making research in their respective national context, to find best practice examples of projects and tools used in adult education by organisations and institutions there. All findings will be collected in an easily readable
form and made available to anyone interested over open source documents on our website.
More information about the project and the progress of the work can be found here:
http://www.isdlearning.eu
Also check out our facebook-page for post about planned events open to the public and new material from the ongoing research:
http://www.facebook.com/isdl2017
Knüpfwerk e.V. 