Description of the project
Early School Leaving (ESL) is a concern for European communities, and it is an obstacle to the growth and development of a country and an incentive to social marginality and educational poverty. One of the main benchmarks used by the European Commission to measure the progress made by Member States in the field of “Education and Training” is precisely the percentage of young people who drop out of school prematurely. The EU has made the fight against dropping out one of its priorities and aims at reducing the drop-out rate to less than 10% by 2020. ESL therefore continues to be a very topical problem that requires policies and measures to combat it.
The DROP’IN project aims at preventing ESL by building on the relationship between teachers and pupils introducing non-formal education methods within the school system, with the aim of motivating students and making them protagonists in their learning process.
The project is in line with the Recommendations of the EU working group on ESL, which defines “the relationship between teacher and pupil as the strongest conditioning factor of school commitment and achievement of objectives”. It makes teachers the main participants in an exchange of experiences and skills allowing to find new solutions and strategies to address the ESL phenomenon and prevent it.
DROP IN involves five partner countries (Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Italy, Latvia), and through the work of organizations, schools, universities and public institutions, aims at creating an educational community that has an impact at local, national and EU level.
OBJECTIVES
- To create an innovative approach by taking advantage of the complementary use of formal and non-formal education methods to combat early school leaving.
- To train teachers on non-formal education techniques and methods to be used in the classroom with their students
- To motivate and support students and make them protagonists of their learning path
- To introduce non-formal methods in schools through cross-sectorial collaboration between organisations, universities and public institutions and municipalities.
ACTIVITIES & RESULTS
- DROP INSIGHT A quantitative and qualitative research on ESL at European, national and local level. The objective is to provide an overview of the ESL phenomenon, analyzing public policies and innovative strategies to counteract it and enhancing the point of view of teachers and the needs of educational communities.
- EDUC’ACTION : THE EDUCATON IN ACTION! A catalogue of at least 30 non-formal education techniques that will be used by teachers and will be the subject of experimentation. The catalogue will present the activities, indicating the objectives, the duration and number of participants, the materials to be used, the results to be obtained and the methods of evaluation. At the end of the experimentation phase, the catalogue will also contain practical examples of the implementation of the activities and will be distributed in each partner country.
- DROP’INVOLVE : Teachers’ training A non-formal education-training programme led by experts for teachers who want to discover and develop non-formal techniques to introduce into their classrooms. The training will aim to make teachers key actors in the educational process, encouraging and motivating them to bring about change in their work and in the school environment.
- DROP’IN ACTION: EXPERIMENTATION & VALORISATION An online portfolio, with the aim of transmitting and describing the experimentation developed within the project and above all making visible the results and impact of the methods tested.
- POLICY PAPER: DROP’ INSPIRATION A policy document with recommendations addressed to policy makers. The document will be distributed on a European scale, giving each partner the opportunity to disseminate the activities at national and local level.
PARTNERS
- PISTES SOLIDAIRES (France)
- COLLEGE ROSA PARKS (France)
- GULBENS NOVADA DOME (Latvia)
- CENTRO PER LO SVILUPPO CREATIVO DANILO DOLCI (Italy)
- ISTITUTO SUPERIORE “DUCA ABRUZZI” LIBERO GRASSI (Italy)
- KNOW AND CAN ASSOCIATION (Bulgaria)
- 119 SECONDARY SCHOOL “ACADEMICIAN MIHAIL ARNAUDOV” (Bulgaria)
- UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LEUVEN (Belgium)
