Meeting in IDRIJA, Slovenia
ROUND TABLE on competences
In
our school, we organized a discussion using the technics of a round table as a
part of the Erasmus+ meeting that we hosted at that time. This means teachers
and young people from seven different countries – Slovenia, Poland, Finland,
Denmark, Austria, Spain and Italy participated. Our topic to discuss was what
competences do young people need in their future work life? Therefore, for more
actual information we invited representatives of some local companies like
Kolektor, Hidria and Ydria Motors. We asked these representatives and the young
people from every country to search for information in their towns that we’d be
able to compare our experience with theirs. The questions we prepared for them
were: do you think young people are taught these competences at school? Any
suggestions how they could develop the competences they don’t have? Would you
be willing to cooperate with schools to promote the development of these skills
and competences? What aid do you offer to young people, in regard to
future employment? In what areas do you offer employment to young people? Do
you believe young people have a place in the town? What are your thoughts on the brain
drain in your town? What
measures do you believe should be taken to combat the issue?
Austria set out that it’s important to present
your own opinion, think critical, have negotiating skills and to make compromises in critical situations.
Their suggestions how to improve these skills were writing more essays on your
own would prepare you to present certain topic and be critical about it, teachers
should focus more on teaching us how to be critical and they also think that it
would be good to cooperate more with some local companies.
Denmark presented us a video, in which they went
around their town and interviewed some representatives of local companies.
In Finland, they found out that some of the
important skills are flexibility,
empathy, patience, good manners and the ability to solve problems. They
think that the best solution would be to get a job and learn these skills
there. In their town, local supermarkets offer 14 days of work practice.
Poland pointed out being responsible for your own actions, to be able to work in groups, to know how to use
different technology (which is not
such a problem in our generation), to be flexible
to all kinds of different situations and people and of course to be happy with what you do. They said
that school doesn’t teach us how to be adults but they are only putting facts,
we’ll need on tests, in our head. In school, we actually learn something
important and that is that we need to be responsible and give away school
papers on time. And one thing we all agreed on in that learning languages is
important.
Spain thinks that creativity, communication, being self-critic and languages are the
most valued competences there. Their argument was that we do learn competences
in school but only in theory and we don’t use them in practice, a suggestion
was that we should have some exercises of real life situations which we would
try and solve. Students there are also interested in cooperating with local
companies.
In following conversations we discussed how to
gain those competences with representatives of our local companies and they
pointed out what competences they are looking for. The answers were quite
similar and in conclusion flexibility, job satisfaction, motivation and passion
are top four competences. They can be gained with hobbies, volunteer work and
being involved in projects like Erasmus+. Our companies are also offering work
practice, summer jobs, scholarships and Kolektor for example is also
cooperating with factory in Germany. The main problem is that those jobs base on technical school
background, which leads us to closure that finding job for a technician, is
much easier in Idrija.
We also agreed that ‘brain drain’ can be considered
as a problem. At first young people who live in smaller towns go to bigger
cities to study, get certain knowledge. Lots of them also go abroad to earn
some experiences. Some of them go just because they like to travel, explore
foreign countries and that’s okay. But in their hometowns they are often not
able to find job and that’s what is keeping them away. They find employment in
big town and they stay there. Now the big question is what we can or better
said should do to prevent migrations of young intellects? In this case we
should all be inspired by Denmark. As students said: ’’After education in big
towns they move back to smaller ones. They also get paid for school so it’s
easier to have small apartment in town.’’ And are they afraid not to get job?
NO, because if they don’t get job they get support from the state so they can
find one. So in Denmark if you are 18+ and you are educated you get some amount
of money that helps you to find job.
After that topic we jumped to creativity, in our
opinion one of most interesting parts of debate. For the start we asked
ourselves what creativity actually is. We got different responses by students
and teacher that creativity in their opinion is graffiti, painting, blogs,
being yourself…And none of them was wrong. In words of Italian student CREATIVITY
IS A WAY TO BE IMMORTAL and according to representative of Kolektor creativity
is about finding new ways of solving problems, to improve existing solutions
not just creating new products. We were also reminded that we often confuse
creativity and technology. Everyone can make a movie with their phone but
creativity takes time and in the end you don’t need expensive equipment to
express yourself. Teachers also pointed out that we can’t be creative on
command and here is the point where we, students agree with them. In our
opinion school doesn’t give us enough space or enough freedom to express
ourselves. Teachers give us thousands of definitions every day that we have to
learn by heart and we don’t even try to understand half of them because we
don’t discuss them, we don’t emphasize their meaning. As simple as that we
opened a new topic that left lots of open questions so it may be excellent
starting point of another round table.
For the end we saved question: ’’Are we active
enough?’’ Well it depends, but for sure students and teachers who participate
in InTime21 and similar projects are active and willing to change something. With
collaborating in these kind of activities we don’t just gain competences, we
also get prepared for future life and obtain certain knowledge that school
can’t give us. With these words in mind we are all anticipating the next
meeting in Spain.
Špela Bratuš & Carolina Petrič
Maruša and I had a peer teaching lesson in our German
class and we were talking about Earth Day. It was a nice and interesting
experience. I have to say that everything is different when you stand in front
of the board and you are trying to explain something to your friends,
especially in language that we are not fluent in. In some moments it’s really
hard too. We were happy to see that our
classmates were listening to us. Students who were present at this class said
that it was interesting experience for them also, they said that classes were
better, because students were able to talk about things that they like and introduce
them to other students. Also, everyone was more relaxed and asked about things
they didn’t know. I hope this day becomes a tradition, or maybe that classes
like this happen more often, because it was definitely a really interesting
experience.
