Fighting discrimination

Besides the effort done by the European Commission and countries discrimination these days is still a problem that affects a percentage of the population. Mobility among countries has brought new ways of discrimination based on ethnic origin, grounds of age, grounds of disability, sexual orientation, grounds of gender, religion of beliefs, etc.

Education without prejudice is an anti discriminatory educational project designed to built and support civic society. As stereotypes and prejudice result in discrimination practices in our societies, the project aims to work against stereotypes and prejudice, to support creating new democratic society free from discrimination.

Project will focus on gender bias and homophobia, still present in European society. Discrimination in those spheres will be overcome only when stereotypes and prejudice disappear. That is why the project aim is to prepare educational anti discriminatory curricula and manual, to prepare teacher and/or trainers and to prepare the scheme of teaching of anti discriminatory trainers.

Anti discriminatory curricula will be based on the studies on the main problems and needs of partners’ countries. Potential trainers will be taught about basic spheres of discrimination in their own environment, methodology of successful teaching and particular methods of anti discriminatory training. Methodology of anti discriminatory training will be based on workshop method combined with online activities available on the open source platform. The e-learning part will be tailored to suit the learning needs of the target group. During the design phase, the requirements concerning the learning preferences will be investigated and taken into account while developing online activities. The accepted didactical and instructional methods will enable to create the content according to the user requirements.

The Learnovation Open Forum entitled “Removing the barriers to creativity and innovation? Listening to stakeholders voice“, was held on 27 May 2009 in Brussels, gathering the main European networks in the field of innovation and ICT for Education and Training. This event was organised by the Learnovation Roundtable with the support of the European Commission as a contribution to the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, and result in the launch of the “10 imperatives for change”  to make European education and lifelong learning a lever for innovation.

During the event, a list of priorities for action was discussed by more than 90 participants and “10 imperatives for changes” were produced, that will be proposed to relevant EU and national policiy makers and will represent the starting point of a broad societal consultation on the desired future of European education and lifelong learning.

The Learnovation ten imperatives for change, to face the challenge of relevance for European education beyond 2010:

1. Rescue research on education an lifelong learning from a marginal position.
2. Provide more evidence to policy making, but choose indicators that are able to push creativity and innovation, not only conformance.
3. Face openly the issue of relevance of current learning provision: change is urgent.
4. Establish more connections among the different areas of Lifelong Learning.
5. Celebrate and recognise learning achievements.
6. Bring informal learning into the policy spectrum.
7. Enhace the innovation capacity of teacher trainning systems.
8. Help teachers and trainers to recognise and respect the value of informal learning.
9. Encourage all forms of learning workplace.
10. Remember that not all workers are stererotypical knowlegde workers.

The conference counted with the participation of prestigious speakers, such as Ms. Odile Quintin, Director General for Education, Trainnig, Culture, Youth (European Comission), Mr. Roberto Carneiro, former Minister of Education of Portugal (Universidade Católica Portuguesa) and Mr. Karlheinz Brandenburg (Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology), ambassador of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation and one of the fathers of mp3 technology.