Stage over de grenzen heen
Start date: Sep 1, 2014,
End date: Aug 31, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
We want to do an application with our school, VISO Roeselare, for this project because we find it very important to give our students the opportunity to have an international workplacement experience. We are a secondary school with specialisations in social courses: f.e. haircare, healthcare, elderly care, kindergarten, ... . We developed this project out off previous contacts with foreign partners. 30 students are able to go abroad for workplacements in Finland, France and the Netherlands. The students will stay 3 weeks abroad and this will also be prepared during several weeks. During this preparation period, participants will get language courses by teachers of the partner schools. The students also get courses to handle stress situations, conflicts and budgetary issues.
The purpose of this project is to improve several skills of the students: communication in another language, teamwork with other students and workplacements, organisational skills. They learn to handle their budget in a consequent way. After the workplacement period, we expect the participants to be more European citizens. Not only the social skills are important, but also the knowledge of their speciality is very important. They see the practise abroad in a elderly home, a kindergarten or a hairdresser. They learn to compare what they see with what they learned in Belgium and be critical in this comparison.
For Finland and France, there are accompanying teachers because the students live there in a house without family. The accompanying teacher therefore is the first contactperson abroad. In the Netherlands there is no accompanying person because the students stay with a guest family. There is a teacher who visits the students in the Netherlands a few days during the workplacement period to see everything is going well.
There's an evaluation of the students by the contactpersons in the workplacment. Therefor we made evaluation document together with the foreign partners and we translated it in French and English.
After the workplacement period the students give a presentation to the other students of the school to tell them the most important experiences. They look criticaly at what they learned, what was the most interesting and where the project has to improve. These experiences are also very important for the workplacements in Belgium. The participants visit them and explain new practises that can be used. We also communicate about the project in our schooldiary. That's an important way to reach parents, workplacements and local interested people to carry out the result. We try to contact te press too, f.e. when the foreign teachers come to Belgium for the preparation of our students.
We expect that the project will have a clear impact on our participants, like I described in the purposes of this project. The impact on our school is also very important. International experiences are mentioned in the vision of our school and it's a priority for us. On short term the experience has a good effect on the participants themselves and on their collegues of the school. It's fantastic to see how enthousiastic they are when they come back. They became real Europeans. On long terms we see that international experiences are a way to avoad that student quit school early. The are looking forward to a workplacement abroad because they heared how nice is it from earlier participants. International experiences only have advantages for our school and that's why we find it soo important to give our students this opportinity.
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