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Cross Cultural Learning and Teaching in Vocational Education and Training (CCLVET)

The results and recommendations accumulated by research on cross cultural learning styles, conducted by different partner institutions in Europe, South America and Asia, funded through four different EU Grant Programmes’ , will form a solid basis for the project at hand. Over the course of four years of intensive research including a survey of thousands of students and a series of successful conferences revealed interesting similarities and differences and a number of best practice examples. This project is the logical continuation of these efforts, and aims to serve as a guideline for teachers and trainers in vocational training institutions in Europe but also in the rest of the world. Teaching in a multicultural classroom environment is a great opportunity and a challenge at the same time. A culturally heterogeneous group of trainees is not easy to handle and there are a multitude of possibilities for misunderstandings between the students and the teacher or between the students themselves. Students are not only different in the way they perceive and understand their environment or how they act in it, but also in the way they learn. To enable teachers and students to understand the differences between their usual single-culture environment and a multicultural setting, not only the students, but often also the teacher, must learn to look at many interactions from a different viewpoint.The Cross Cultural Learning and Teaching Styles (CCLTS) series of projects and events has looked at the problem of cross cultural issues from many different angles but with a unified method, which has been developed and refined throughout the projects mentioned above. Its strength lies in its multicultural approach in analyzing learning and teaching styles and the size of the accumulated knowledge base consisting of the results of a large scale survey and the four-year research on cross cultural topics. This knowledge base has been used to produce a number of successful brochures, books and websites which are used by professors and students all over the world. Until now this products were tailored for higher education institutions, especially for universities acting in an international environment not for vocational training institutions, also the focus of CCLTS was not mainly on inter European cultural differences. In the scope of this project the aim is to use the knowledge base of the CCLTS projects and the well established methodology to assess the cultural differences between European countries and to focus our product development as well as dissemination efforts on vocational training institutions in the partner countries. In this way we will be able to use the synergies available and to expand the scope of the consortium’s knowledge base at the same time .The present proposal will use existing results listed above in many ways. For the academic results, such as the books, and not listed academic papers, which are also of key value forming the knowledge basis for the products, we will use them as reference material from which we will take the method for information gathering and establishment of cultural differences in learning. So these are the basis for the transfer of methods and investigation results to the VET sector. The products and practical results listed above will be used directly in the development of the e-manual. Where adaptations are needed these will be made according to the insights gained on the new countries. The added value will be to broaden the scope of the topic cross cultural learning from higher education towards VET as well as to include countries within Europe that previously had not undertaken any efforts in systematically observing cultural differences in learning and to develop standardized as well as localized approaches to tackle cultural frictions to increase the learning efficacy of VET systems.
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