Training on Social Inclusion in Tourism, by including elderly people as local storytellers for the Tourism Industry

May 31, 2020News

Are you a VET professional?

Do you work in the social field and are you interested in experiential tourism? 

 Do you feel the need to acquire new competences and knowledge in order to interact in a more creative way with the elderly people?

 Do you think that the elderly people you are working with need to be involved in more active and participatory activities?

TSITour Training on Social Inclusion in Tourism, by including elderly people as local storytellers for the Tourism Industry aims to develop a training module for the VET courses on the fields of care and welfare, which will provide a training on how to implement projects that will develop the storytelling competencies of elderly people under social care inside the touristic sector, fostering their role in the society and valuing  them.

TSITour is a project funded by the Erasmus+ Programme Key Action 2: Strategic Partnerships for Vocational Education and Training. The project will last 2 years.

Objectives

  • To create a training module on “Project Development for Social Inclusion and Valorisation of People with Special Needs of Social Assistance” for VET students in the field of social care and welfare;
  • To develop hard and soft skills of VET students to create and implement projects and activities for Social Inclusion and Valorisation;
  • To better prepare the VET students to address the challenges at the work place, with focus on the people under need of social assistance;
  • To increase the notoriety of VET in the field of care and welfare;
  • To use tourism and the elderly under need of social assistance as departure points to transform the tourism industry and the approach to social assistance, by valorising the elderly as voluntary Local Storytellers for the tourism industry;
  • To increase the number of social inclusion tools and its beneficiaries.

The project foresees the development of 2 main results

TSITour Training Programme

A Training Programme including a Module on Project Development aiming at providing trainees with the proper tools to create, implement and evaluate a project on social inclusion of elderly people as volunteer “Local Storytellers”. The Programme will be developed after a detailed analysis of:

  1. the potential benefits of “Local Storytellers” for the Tourism Industry;
  2. needs of performance of welfare/social professionals;
  3. elderly peoples’ Inclusion and Valorisation;
  4. needs of disabled people, old people and people in risk of exclusion;
  5. good practices on the field.

 

TSITour Training Platform, Resources and Pilot Testing

A module and related resources addressed to trainees from VET courses in the social areas providing knowledge, skills and competencies to create, implement and evaluate a Project on Social Intervention using tourism as case study. These online platform contents will be validated through 2 pilotings, involving VET students and elderly people implementing the acquired knowledge.

Kick-off meeting

The project partnership already gathered in the sunny Espinho (Portugal) for the kick-off meeting of the project held on 23rd-24th January 2020. It was an occasion to meet all in person and agree on the timeline. Then, all the partners refined in cooperation the first 4 tools of the research that will be the starting point for the TSITour Training Programme.

What’s next?

 

  • All the partners will make 60 interviews in total to stakeholders in the field of tourism and social care in order to compile the benefits of the local storytellers;
  • All the partners will submit 200 questionnaires to representatives of SMEs, welfare/social professionals, VET trainers on social areas SMEs and representatives of private social solidarity institutions in order to identify the current efforts made by welfare /social professionals for the inclusion of elderly people;
  • All the partners will gather 20 interviews in total with welfare / social professionals dealing with elderly people in order to have insights on the activities performed for social inclusion of the elderly people;
  • All the partners will collect good practices on social inclusion of the elderly population, that can be inspirational for the project implementation.

Do you want to join the project?

Soon, we are going to start to write down the structure of the Training Programme and we need VET workers to help with the elaboration and sharing of their professional experience with us. Your contribution will be fundamental in order to detect the needs on which to build our Training Programme.

If you wish to support us with at least one of those activities, please contact us by Facebook or Website.

Partners