Norwegian strategies introduced at this year's symposium

How can young people find their way through the jungle of persons and systems ? A question asked here in the Netherlands, but also in Norway.
It's become a tradition at our university of applied sciences by now to hold an annual symposium on approaches to dropout prevention.
Apart from a number of Dutch presenters, this year two Norwegian speakers from the south eastern Vestfold region outlined what steps they had taken to tackle the issues of dropout and talent development of all youngsters. A 10-year action programme that started in 2008 has already shown some progress, we were told. The coordinator of this action programme (Mr Eldar Dybvik) and a member of the steering committee (Mr Thorbjorn Nygaard) explained how many of the stakeholders had come together to cooperate for the benefit of the 20 % young people that still drop out of school, despite a variety of earlier measures.
"United we stand. Divided we fall" is the motto of the cooperation agreement between schools, the labour union, the police, the social security system, nurses, the world of enterprise, the parents and the young people themselves.
When young people drop out of school, they —and society at large— face multiple negative consequences, which makes it worthwhile working on all kinds of preventive approaches.
Have a look at the slides and compare the Norwegian methods with the ones Rotterdam has put into place.

Norwegian strategies

View more presentations from Anja S

Here's also a visual report of the symposium.

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

Interestingly, a DJ team called 'Freestyle Party Machine' had put together an appropriate music selection for this occasion: all 20 songs had a link to education and/or youngsters;)

Getting a taste of a European project meeting

It's now approximately one year later .... still, it's interesting to get a taste of what happened during a 2 day meeting of one of the Grundtvig Learning Partnerships projects. In our case the theme of the project was: Ethical Competence as Educational component in Adult Education.
One member of the Dutch delegation took it up as a challenge to film all kinds of activities that we undertook.
Here's the link to part 1 of a series of 4 videos posted on YouTube:
http://youtu.be/Z5RU1B2qM1Y
In this first part you'll see the opening session of the projectmeeting on day 1 and a guided city tour through Palermo.
Here's the link to part 2:
http://youtu.be/2PZ-MJq3obA , where you'll see the second part of the guided tour and the visit to the Danilo Dolci primary school in Partinico. Our host was after all the Centro per lo Sviluppo Creativo “Danilo Dolci” in Palermo, Sicily.
Here's the link to part 3:
http://youtu.be/W8JTfjPwsi0
Here you'll get a good impression of the lay out and special surroundings of the Danilo Dolci school.
And here's the final part of the series:
http://youtu.be/IqxesfPYDsg
You'll see a continuation of the interview with a teacher AND former pupil of the Danilo Dolci school and the video ends with a series of photos taken in the course of the 2 day meeting.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This blog post reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained herein.