Erasmus+ KA2 project "Step to the New Life"
About the project "Step to the New Life" and the final product "Teacher's guide" (you can download it by pressing the title)
At the beginning of the project and during its main course the main objective was to exchange the experience between teachers, who work with foreigners (refugees, asylum seekers, prisoners) and teach them National languages in Lithuania, Latvia and Croatia. Another objective was to create a final product “Teacher’s guide” (you can download it by presing the link), which would contain information about the systems of immigrants’ integration in each country, a curricula about teaching minority of Roma people and the main thing – the extended studying plan with methods, comments, based on the needs of educators. These needs were uncovered by the dedicated questionnaire for educators who teach foreigners. It was created specifically for this project to gather as much information as needed to get the sense of what kind of issues do educators face during the studying year. We have also created dedicated questionnaire for students, who are learning national language in all three countries. This information helped us to understand what topics are the most important to them and if they need some extra help from the educators. All of this information, from both questionnaires, was used to create the extended studying year plan for the educators.
Our main goals, as mentioned earlier, were to exchange the experience and prepare the book for educators, which would help them improve their studying plans, methods etc. So, speaking about the process of exchanging the experience, I have to mention that we had I great and productive partners meetings with all of the institutions that take care of education of adult foreigners (NGOs, adult teaching centers, refugees reception centers, prisons). During these meetings we had not only presented the project, but also presented systems of teaching and integration in general through all of the three countries. Aside of this informative meetings, our associated partners (Refugees Reception Center in Lithuania and POUZ in Croatia; Vilnius correctional house in Lithuania and Officers Training center in Croatia) made some actual contacts for the future projects, since they work in the same fields. The other result is our main final product “Teacher’s guide”, which contain information about the things that are important in the education system for adult foreigners in each country, the issues and solutions how to solve them in the process of teaching Roma people and the extended studying year plan, that is based on the information, that was gathered form the dedicated questionnaires. We have successfully achieved these goals completely and we are proud of not only creating the teaching tool, but also becoming the mediators for the future cooperation between other institutions (our associated partners).
We actually had one problem that stood in the way of making complete “Teacher’s guide”. We promised that we will put a video classes into the final product. We have gathered this video material and it is ready to be used, but one of the prisoners, who agreed to participate in these classes and to be videotaped, after couple of weeks wrote a strong complaint about us using this information. Based on this complaint, the Prison in Lithuania (Lukiskes Remand Prison-Closed Prison) forbade us to use this material, doe to the possibility of getting us to the court.
So, with a minor step back, we have actually succeed in our project and achieved our main goals: The manual was created and is ready to be used by all of the educators who need it; The exchange of the experiences was also successful, because we get in touch with couple of very motivated institutions: NGO “Shelter “Safe House” connected us with teacher, who gave us a major tour through the whole online teaching model (link to a webpage: www.sazinastilts.lv) of Latvian language and they are ready to cooperate with us in adopting that system to Lithuanian language. The second institution that is ready to cooperate is the Officers Teaching Center in Zagreb, Croatia. They are offering their full help in developing the new teaching center in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Here you can also find all of the questionnaires, that educators and students fulfilled and were used as the main matterial creating the final product "teacher's guide":
Croatia's questionnaires:
Latvia's questionnaires