AHENE stands for Animal Husbandry Exchanges in Northwest Europe
Kainuu Vocational College (Finland)
The aim of AHENE project is to investigate if we can organise exchanges of European students to follow their school lessons about Animal Husbandry abroad at one of the partner schools.
We offer eight learning modules of four weeks each to students from Wales, the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland (these are our initial AHENE project countries). This is a 3-year pilot to see if what we are offering will be good practice for the future.
The 4-week AHENE modules all include two weeks of learning at school and two weeks of practical on-the-job learning. Everything is based on the ECVET principles i.e. learning outcomes obtained abroad will be assessed, validated and recognized back at the home institution. We are learning by doing and are quite enthusiastic about the student exchanges so far! Each partner has identified learning outcomes and knowledge, skills and competences for their two modules. The topics chosen per country combine the partner’s expertise within its own country with interesting animal husbandry matter. In this way, we hope to interest as many students as possible to take part in one of the courses abroad.
The modules are:
- Dairy Cows and Dogs in Finland
- Sledge Dogs and Nordic Wild Animals in Sweden
- Sheep Husbandry and Beef Cattle in Wales
- Husbandry of Reptiles and First Aid for (small) animals in The Netherlands
The main goal of our project is to offer new educational materials to students and to do so according to the principles of ECVET. All experiences have been collected and will be used for improvements later on. On returning to the home school, we ultimately want the home school to recognise and validate what the students have learned abroad. This means that the students do not have to take part in the same lessons back at their home school again.
During each project meeting, a part of the programme has included visiting a practical training activity or lessons at one of the partner-schools. In this way all partners involved have been able to get a good impression of teaching styles and methods used in each partner country. Each partner has been practicing teaching in English to its own students. The reactions have been very encouraging – students are eager to help the teachers with their English vocabulary!
If you would like to have any more information, please look at this short video (AHENE starts from 2 minutes and 50 seconds)
or contact Gail Wright, AHENE project manager (gwright@lentiz.nl).