“European practices of mentoring with young people adults at risk of social disadvantaged and school drop-out” - EMYA PROJECT

Coordinator: AIM – Agenzia Intercultura e Mobilità – youth association

The partners:

• Germany - Volkshochschule Aachen – Das Weiterbildungszentrum – Adult education centre
• Latvia - Biedrība PASSWORD - youth association
• Poland - Centrum Kształcenia Ustawicznego – school for adult education
• Hungary - Belvárosi Tanoda Alapítványi Gimnázium és Szakközépiskola secondary and vocational school, Budapest
• Romania - Colegiul Technic “APULUM” Alba Iulia – Technical High school
• Italia - Fenice societá cooperativa sociale onlus – social cooperative.

Summary:

EMYA is a learning partnership involving partners belonging to different contexts in the European training and education field. High schools, second chance schools, centers for adult education, school for continuous education, foundations and NGOs from Italy, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Poland and Romania, have co-operated and researched in the field of mentoring at local, national and international level during two years.

Starting from the main topic of mentoring and trying to outline its meaning and a common methodology, the project gave to the partners the opportunity to analyze key issues like: adult learning and training; motivation of educators, mentors and trainers; the importance of building relationships with students; the development and evaluation of key competences; mediation skills; counseling of students; conflicts resolution; creativity; use of ICT and
communications styles.
Mentoring at European level, as a combination of approaches and methodologies, can become a real resource for every National Education System to support educator's attitudes, motivation and creativity. In many countries Mentoring is not recognized and teachers don't receive training to work with disadvantaged young adults and students, to recognize their needs and problems, to solve conflicts, to create an inclusive and healthy learning
environments and fight student’s drop out.

In European society there is still a wide discrepancy between the provisions set up in the European main guidelines and directives, such as Lisbon Strategy, Bologna Process, 2020 Strategy, cooperation programs and the national realities for education and training in terms of opportunities and services addressing the needs of disadvantaged adult learners.
The learning partnership program contributed to narrow the above mentioned gap through mutual learning and methodologies exchange, crossing formal, non-formal and informal education, social and work-related integration, development of key competences, fostering innovation in national education and training systems.
The main outcome of this project is a Training Kit useful to reflect about the benefits of mentoring in educational institutions, mentor’s training, the possible target of reference and the different contexts of intervention.
The Training Kit shows the results of a deep 2-years research involving hundreds of experts: trainers, professional mentors, educators and teachers.
The T-Kit, the e-book version, all the documents and documentation materials are downloadable from the official website www.emya-mentoring.eu which will be online also during the next years. It's our intention to plan a follow up and carry on our investigation for our personal and professional growth in this field.