From the 28th February to the 9th March, a group of 8 young people coming from Palermo were given the opportunity to go to Mönchengladbach, Germany, in order to pursue a professional internship through a European project financed by the Erasmus + programme titled DISCO: Digital Second Chance Opportunities.
The project’s goal is to improve the quality of lifelong learning for adults and Second Chance schools, thereby promoting social inclusion of NEETs – Not engaged in Education, Employment or Training – , improving the quality of education and training and decreasing school drop-out.
Throughout this project, a digital platform titled Second Chance Education has been created, in order to support teachers and trainers who work with NEETs. A session of the platform is dedicated to the support of the actors involved in the different steps of the mobility. This working experience was also the occasion to test the tools gathered by CESIE and included in that session, that can be used by anyone performing this type of project.
A section titled “My Mobility Handbook” has been created within the mobility session. It will allow the participants of mobility projects, after a registration, to upload documents, tools that have been used, photos and other testimonies of the performed activity, in order to share their mobility experience with their trainer/teacher. In practice, this session acts as a proper e-portfolio, and during their experience, the young people were able to test the e-portfolio as well as the tools provided by CESIE, in order to finalise the platform that can be used in the future by who work with mobility projects.
The group included 8 young people coming from the following countries: Italy, Egypt, Zambia, Gambia, Senegal and France.
Once they arrived in Germany, they have been greeted by the director of the school Weiterbildungskolleg, Reinhold Schiffers, with whom they have analysed the fears and expectations regarding the execution of the internships. Following this greeting session, the young trainees have visited the various work placements, which have been decided according to their skills and professional objectives. During the visits, they have met their supervisors so that they could have an overview of the tasks they will have to perform and their work schedule.
This experience has been highly educational on many different levels: on the first hand, the participants were able to perform professionalizing internships, improving thus their professional competences and discovering future working fields. On the other hand, they were able to improve their social, relational and linguistic skills.
Moreover, this trip has given the participants an occasion to discover the German culture, which is quite different from the Italian culture, especially when it comes to the scholar system and work schedule.
The participants have spent 10 days in Germany in total, for 5 days of internship, and obviously there have been free days for relaxation and leisure. The experience ended with the final evaluation.
For more information about the project please contact Irene Pizzo irene.pizzo@cesie.org
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