M4A Marketing4Artists is a two-year Erasmus+ funded project which will be concluded in January 2024.
Coordinated by Šolski Center Srečka Kosovela Sežana (SI), M4A partnership is also composed by Education in Progress (ES), Materahub (IT), LIVE College (FI), EfVET (BE) and “Romulus Ladea” High School of Visual Arts (RO).
Research conducted before and during the project (which included focus groups with Vocational Education and Training (VET) Arts teachers, directors and students) allowed to identify the need to include Marketing-related contents in VET Art courses, allowing teachers and students to develop marketing and entrepreneurship skills and knowledge, which are crucial for the students’ professional success upon graduation.
As such, M4A proposes a change in the way students are trained in vocational schools by integrating the Didactic Units developed in the project into the VET Art curricula. These Units are aimed at teachers (Unit 0) and students (remaining Units), and their material, i.e., contents, exercises and evaluation questionnaire, can also be used as additional resources by the teachers themselves with their students, in training.
Figure 1 Titles of the 6 M4A Didactic Units available at m4a.erasmus4artists.eu
M4A Multiplier Event at EfVET Annual Conference 2023
The project is at its final stage. As such, each partner is responsible to contribute for M4A Policy Recommendation (aimed at policy and decision makers, and focused on describing how to integrate the results of the project in VET Art curricula to ensure the development of marketing and entrepreneurship skills in teachers and students). This last Result will be ready by the end of the year.
In the meantime, partners are currently carrying out the final Multiplier Events (MEs) of the project, aimed at teachers, students and managers from national and international VET Art schools, representatives of cultural institutions and national and European policy makers interested in the outputs of the project.
The MEs are an opportunity to present the project to its target groups, to present M4A Methodology, to showcase the contents of M4A online Training Platform, where all Didactic Units developed by partners are now available, and to talk about all potentialities of using M4A results with VET Art teachers and students by integrating the project’s learning module on the VET curricula.
EfVET carried out its ME during a Roundtable session at EfVET Annual Conference, on October 27th.
The session had a total of 26 participants coming from 13 countries (including Armenia and India), who were invited to access to the Training Platform to understand its contents, how they can enrol in each Didactic Unit themselves and get a Certificate of Achievement (issued by the Platform after successfully completing the evaluation questionnaire in each Unit) at the end of the process.
Participants were very interested in completing each Unit because the topics addressed by the whole M4A course are relevant for them as VET teachers.
Overall, the session was really successful considering the feedback provided by participants:
- The fact that we have a certificate is a plus that allows me to understand if I need to improve my skills or not (comment based on the percentage of success that is part of the certificate);
- We can go back and re-do the units if we need, depending on our training needs and time to do them, which is good;
- Another positive aspect is that we can use these resources with our students,
- I am a graphic teacher and me and my colleagues were searching for something like this, so I will share with them what I learned today with this project and will invite them to use the training platform.
