The week in Jihlava – Inclusive Vocational Education and Training

In the beginning of November me and my colleague Outi Rantanen from Tamk took part to Erasmus+ workshop-week in Jihlava as a experts from Tampere University of Apply Sciences (Tamk).

It was the first meeting of the project called CSTEPS. The project is focused on I-VET (Inclusive Vocational Education and Training) learners with special needs. In CSTEPS-project the school staff from four different countries (Czech Republic, England, Italy and Finland) will be trained to help special needs learners to finish studies and successfully enter the labour market. The aim is to create work based learning (WBL) toolkit by sharing experiences.

The week in Jihlava was the first step of CSTEPS. The whole project will last two years and this first workshop was more like kick off. The week was nice, there were educators and students from all four countries and the co-operation worked well.

The students had their own workshops together and we as educators had our own planning and presentation workshops.

The role of Tamk is to collect ideas from educators´ training events and students´ blended mobility workshops, ideas for improving quality of vocational education of special need learners and also methods suitable for I-VET learners with low academic knowledge.

During the week we had a possibility to get to know something about the school system of Czech Republic and the other participant countries as well, we visited the different workshops of vocational school Stredni skola stavebni Jihlava,.

The whole delegation visited also Telc, the beautiful fairytale-like little town. A square which looks like it has come straight from the fairytales, a romantic chateau and fishponds surrounding the city. Telc is part of Unesco World Heritage.

The project will carry on, the experiences from the first meeting were encouraging and the students were happy (they gave about 10/10 points in evaluation line) and the educators as well (9/10).  Even there were slush time in Jihlava, we shined.

Juha Lahtinen