DO-IT (Digital cOmpetence to teach youth with mIgranT background) is a KA2 project co-founded by the European Union under the Erasmus Plus programme. The partners taking part in the DO-IT project, from now on called “the consortium”, are representatives of four different European countries: Belgium (Ecepaa), Italy (Associazione Joint and AMECE), Spain (Red Incola) and Greece (The 2nd Vocational High School of Katerini).
DO-IT focuses on digital learning and education, addressing a wide spectrum of stakeholders that commonly deal with young people with a migrant background in the education system.
The Consortium
The organisation coordinating the DO-IT project is Ecepaa (European Center for Economic and Policy Analysis and Affairs). It is specialized in the development of European Union projects in the fields of social inclusion, education, youth and migrant.
Associazione Joint is a youth association based in Italy, the work of which mainly focuses on providing learning opportunities to young people through international experiences, such as European Solidarity Corps, International volunteering, Work Camps, local and international Training Courses, Youth Exchanges and Capacity Building Projects.
AMECE (Association Maison d’Enfant pour la Culture et l’Education – Italy) is based in Turin. Its activities aim to understand and address the needs of children, teenagers and young adults with migrant backgrounds, most of them originally from north African countries.
Fundacion Red Incola is a Foundation composed by nine religious entities. Its mission is to support the immigrant population in risky situations of exclusion, in the promotion and defense of their rights so that they can have a dignified life.
The 2nd Vocation High School of Katerini is a school in Greece that serves around 600 students, aged 16 – 19, with 80 teachers and comprises four different sectors (Informatics, Healthcare & Welfare, Agriculture/Food Technology/Nutrition and Business/Economics).
The Project
Complying with the general Erasmus Plus policy and the Call for Proposals in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the overall objective of the DO-IT project is to develop an innovative practice in the digital framework, while committing to a greater social inclusion of students with a migrant background by tackling the early-school-leaving phenomenon. On such a perspective, giving a transnational dimension to the project means to allow a deeper understanding and examination of the digital education sector, strong of a comparative analysis.
Moving forward, the specific objectives of the project are:
- Identify, develop and disseminate good practices and innovative digital tools to provide teachers and trainers with skills that make them able to address the needs of youth with a migrant background, arised as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic;
- Promote the recognition of digital competences and soft-skills acquired with youth with a migrant background while participating in informal activities;
- Increase the capacity of 50 teachers and trainers on digital competences by providing them with a training on the 5 competences framed in the “Digital Competence Framework 2.0”;
- Increase the capacity of 50 teachers and trainers to recognise the digital competences and soft-skills acquired by youth with a migrant background during informal experiences.
The background
Given the above, the DO-IT project takes its origin from a general consideration over the consequences of Covid-19 towards the most disadvantaged young people (with a migrant background) in the education sector.
In fact the lockdown restrictions over Europe, made compulsory by governments, have had different effects, depending on the family income. This establishes huge issues with respect to how to ensure access, equity and inclusion in the learning environment.
From this perspective, and a consequence, while the indirect beneficiaries of the DO-IT project outputs are young people with a migrant background, the direct ones are the members of the organizations participating in the project itself, i.e. teachers, trainers, researchers, youth workers and associations of migrants and their children.
DO-IT implementation
The DO-IT project is expected to reach several results. The partners, bringing together their expertise in the field of reference, will be creating 5 questionnaires to deliver to 5 different categories of stakeholders:
- Youth workers;
- Trainers;
- Teachers;
- Researchers;
- Migrant associations members.
In addition to that, the consortium will be working on building 5 additional questionnaires for in-depth interviews. After collecting the data, the final result will be a digital publication over several topics, such as school dropout, lack of digital skills to cope with the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the good and best practices to address in order to mitigate the negative effects of the pandemic on the education and learning of young people with a migrant background.
DO-IT therefore represents an innovative way to address the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic on education, with a focus on the needs of youth with a migrant background and the wide range of professionals working with them.
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