01. Januar 2011 bis 31. Dezember 2012
Kommission der Europäischen Union
Dr. Christoph Kaletka
Dr. Christoph Kaletka, Dr. Bastian Pelka, Dr. Hans-Werner Franz
Sozialforschungsstelle Dortmund (sfs)
Tel.: +49 231 8596-287
Sozialforschungsstelle Dortmund (sfs)
+49 231 8596-268
Intergenerational Learning Circle for Community Service
The consortium consists of eight partners who have different but complementary expertise, work experiences and in different areas of influence nationally and internationally.
The eScouts project aims to prove that innovative ways of communication and activism through ICT are strongly re-shaping social interaction, learning approach as well as general perspective of life’s expectations and values. Elderly facing the digital gap and assessing the youth can still feel useful and updated within the society, and youth can learn perspectives in values and can be inspired to discover their job preferences since they become teachers and get to know ICT from another point of view. In addition, the interaction itself hopes to be a great benefit for both target group and from a community vision, an important social improvement.
Intergenerational Learning Circle for Community Service eScouts is aimed to develop an innovative intergenerational learning exchange between elderly and youth volunteers, centred on the development of the digital competences of the eldest and on the guidance to the youngest to better face their upcoming adult life challenges.
This intergenerational experience will take place through a variety of local stakeholder organisations (LSO, e.g. public internet centres, youth and elderly associations, etc) with a view to produce a transversal impact over the communities they are serving.
In this way, eScouts expects to contribute to broader inclusion objectives and policies (both in digital and social terms), like the EU Ministers’ Riga Declaration on “ICT for an inclusive society” (2006), or the recent “Digital Agenda for Europe” (2010).
The partnership aims to develop an innovative, intergenerational exchange between the elderly and young volunteers, using ICT as a vehicle for the promotion and exchange.
The e-Facilitators have a crucial task, not only as teachers of ICT, but also as socio-cultural mediators. They promote disadvantaged users inclusion and e-Inclusion. Today their profile and their status varies considerably from country to country as well as access to formal or informal training. The project partnership “eScouts” will conduct a comparison study of these profiles and about the available educational opportunities in their respective countries. The goal will be to create a common professional profile in Europe. In the long term, “facilitators” will include trainers, tutors and other learning supporting profile working in the field of the third sector (involved in youth, volunteers, citizenship, …). High school could also be included, users of telecentres as well as senior entities and retired residences.
The Partnership aims to create a common and certifiable curriculum for different target group (young, elderly and the facilitators promoting e-Inclusion), to be exploited by the partner organizations and new stakeholders thanks to exploitation plan. Youth will be prepared under the “Community Service – Learning” approach, having practical assessment and advising, while performing their task in reality. Elderly, once learned how to manage ICT, will take benefit from it addressing their expertise and vision of reality to their young teachers, complementing this process in face to face meeting to empower the emotional links between them. A final feedback from the youth will be promoted to close the exchanging circle.
Contextualization of the learning program designs will be a relevant aspect to assure the success of the initiative, but to make it scalable to further realities, guidelines and recommendations will be created in order to facilitate the process.
Beginning of 2012, eScouts project team worked on the test phase of its training modules, created for Intergenerational Learning Exchange programme for social inclusion. 500 people from all partner countries (Spain, Bulgaria, Poland, Germany and UK) participated actively in the implementation phase and in the training programme.
During this session are been developed a series of activities aimed at achieving capture young people to participate in the project. All Countries involved have implemented this module with success. In this module, young people were trained to become facilitators and trainers of elderly.
During this training, youth have participated as youth facilitators and senior adults became learners of ICT skills. Facilitators only participated during this process to help youth facilitators, encourage them, support them, if necessary, and participated in a sort of monitoring of the process. Also this module is been implemented in all countries involved in the project with success.
During this moduls, Facilitators have trained Seniors Adults to become mentors for youth people. This module is very important in the managment of the project. In fact, the real challenge is the meeting of young people with the elderly. Often it is much easier to involve elderly people in youth activities that youth in elderly activities. It is very important provide useful tools for the elderly for the involvement of youth. This module must still be implemented in some partner countries.