The Project
According to EUGE (European Institute of Gender Equality), the term Marginalized Groups is used to address groups of people within a given culture, context and history at risk of being subjected to multiple discrimination due to the interplay of different personal characteristics or grounds, such as sex, gender, age, ethnicity, religion or belief, health status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, education or income, or living in various geographic localities. https://eige.europa.eu/thesaurus/terms/1280. A multitude of articles and actions can be found within the pages of the commission’s website, indicating that the need to find means to integrate those persons living on the margins of society has been identified and attempts to include them are at the forefront of EU policy (indicative titles: Socio-Economic Integration Of Marginalized Communities, Fighting Marginalisation, Inclusion Of Vulnerable Groups). It is commonplace that persons belong to more than one marginalized group, as society raises its barriers towards any difference.
Education is rightly considered to be a basic human right, without which sustainable social and economic development is rare. Nowadays the trainers are called to pass on educational information on crucial topics to an increasing number of marginalized groups; there are many projects aiming to facilitate the inclusion of minorities such as Roma, upskilling projects targetted at NEET and low-skilled individuals, organizations trying to tend to the needs of an increasing mumber of imigrants and refugees. The raw fact is that the majority of Adult Trainers in the EU have little to no experience with teaching marginalized groups, as each group has diverse reasons to enroll to a training course, needs a different approach to embrace its training and has a different “learning curve”.
In this Project
we propose a number of LTT Activities where trainers of the institutions involved will jointly discuss the topic of educational approaches and good practices on different marginalized groups. The scope of these LTTAs is to allow for discussions and exchange of experiences and practices between trainers of the participating institutions; each institution will send two adult trainers to participate and present the organization’s experience and actions on the particular topic. The participants will compare educational experieces and discuss the solutions utilized to overcome barriers which impeded their work on the particular topic; open discussion and solution comparison will indicate the best practices to used by the institutions.
Combining
the experiences of training organizations belonging to different cultures and nations is key to effectively addressing the learning impedements of many a marginalized group; problems faced by the same group in different countries are mostly common; young unemployed adults face the same financial and social issues in most countries, immigrants face the same cultural, inclusion and communication issues and so on. Practicing this project in a transnational level offers many benefits such as identification of common issues and solutions applied.
During this project
there is a number of results expected to occur, for different target groups.
The primary results expected are: The participating trainers will increase their skill-set and training effectiveness when training adult learners belonging to one or more marginalized groups relevant to this project; The participatiing organizations will increase their offered services for adult learners belonging to one or more marginalized groups relevant to this project; A set of presentations will be created after each LTTA, presenting the similarities and suggested practices when training adult learners belonging to one or more marginalized groups relevant to this project; Trainers and organizations belonging to the networks of the participating organizations will similarly benefit; The project will increase the Attractiveness of Life Long Learning for Adult Learners in the areas of effect of the Participating Organizations.
