Cyanotypes at the Creative Skills Week 2024
The Creative Skills Week is a two-days event aimed to bring together students and professionals involved in the Culture and Creative Industries (CCI) from all over the world, and Cyanotypes project (https://cyanotypes.website/), of which EfVET is part as full partner was, for the second year, one of the main highlights of this event organised in collaboration with the Pact for Skills.
This year, all Cyanotypes partners gathered in Amsterdam (NL) between September 17th and 20th, first for the project’s Transnational Meeting, where an overview of the first two years of the project was made by the project coordinator (HKU – University of the Arts Utrecht, NL), and a preview of the next two years was made by the leaders of the project’s Work Packages (WP).
After this meeting, partners focused solely on the different panel sessions, workshops, discussions, contributions from inspirational speakers, experimental learning activities, and micro-credential testing labs, making the most out of their participation in the Creative Skills Week (CSW).
On the first day of the event, Susana Nogueira (EfVET) was invited to ask a question to the policy makers from DG EAC, DG Grow and EIT Culture, speaker of the session focused on the topic “Local & European Skills Ecosystems: How to strengthen the CCSI?”. Susana asked for their opinion on how to foster the implementation of Cyanotypes (in specific) and of other Erasmus+ funded projects’ results (in general) given the strict policies that regulate intense VET curricula in some EU countries that sometimes hinder the inclusion of such results into the training processes. Svein Hullstein, from Higher Education Policy – Unit B1 of the European Commission replied that “there is no solution for this issue considering that each country has its own regulations for education and training”, but that all projects and partners need to continue doing their best to demonstrate to policy makers at national level the relevance of such results and their positive impact on schools, teachers and learners.
Apart from this intervention, EfVET and Materahub collaborated to present MOSAIC and its training module “Social Inclusion”, aimed at VET Teachers, during one of the multiple CSW workshops, considering that both MOSAIC and Cyanotypes projects address this topic (in addition to the fact that this was an incredible opportunity to connect both projects!).
Susana Nogueira and Valentina Chanina (EfVET) joined Eleonora Santini, Becky Riches and Hay Li Nguyen (Materahub) to present the sub-module “Unconscious Bias” and to deliver a set of practical exercises that allowed all participants to reflect on this attitude and understand how it can be overcome for a positive learning environment.
A very interesting and insightful session, that fostered further discussions among participants about their own unconscious bias, and their interest in participating in the upcoming open pilots of MOSAIC Training Modules and Moodle platform (more news about this activity soon!).
During the CSW, Cyanotypes also had its own workshops dedicated to its Training Framework, comprised of training courses, practical exercises and toolkit that will allow HVET teachers to use it to further develop future CCI professionals’ skills and competencies, capacitating them for the triple transition – social, digital and green.
These workshops were delivered by the different partners of the project in charge of developing the Framework in order to collect participants’ inputs for further improvements, before it is piloted at European level, by teachers and students from VET (EQF levels 3 to 5) and Higher Education (EQF level 6 to 8).
More news about these pilots will be provided soon to all EfVET Members!
