LearnersMot Erasmus+ project is being developed by the LearnersMot partnership. It addresses the issues of literacy and low educated as well as low skilled workers’ education. Prior to the literacy course that is yet to be developed and piloted, partners wrote a handbook to be used by adult educators intervening in companies.

LearnersMot project partners are:

Edensol Danmarc, Španija
Eurocrea Merchant, Italija
UPI –Ljudska univerza Žalec, Slovenija
SUTŽO, Slovenija
Eurosuccess Consulting, Ciper

The Deep In Handbook has been written with in mind the needs of low educated and low skilled workers, decision makers and companies and above all the needs of adult educators preparing for an educational intervention within a company. In today’s economy  companies  keep adapting  to rapid  changes. Professions and division of work are  ever less present since most of  workers have to perform a variety of tasks on their own or in a team. Consequently, the old hierarchy  of jobs and tasks has been vanishing. Moreover, companies are ever more service and customer oriented. This requires from both workers and decision makers high level of flexibility and adaptability to changes. If they are not able to adapt,  their job and company are at risk. In such situation it is impossible to rely only on single workers. On the contrary, decision makers have to trust all workers including those who are most vulnerable. They have to be confident that these workers can improve and have potentials.

Education and training address these workers’ potentials. Addressing low educated and low skilled workers,  adult educators have a complex task to accomplish. They have to animate the learners to enroll in the program. They have to motivate them as to trigger their intrinsic, primary motivation for learning, help them overcome their adversity to learning and changing, maintain them in education persuading them that education is a way for them to construct their future.  To this end they  prepare an educational programme taking into account low educated and low skilled workers’ (latent) partial, unstructured knowledge, the core characteristics  of functional illiterates, knowing that they dislike writing.  Education for  functional illiterates is extremely important. On one side the performance of the enterprise is to be developed and on the other side the trust of  workers  should be increased.  Adult educators know that today’s society requires writing, reporting, abstract thinking and this is precisely what functionally illiterate workers lack. Adult educators know  that writing is closely related to speaking and understanding and are  most useful for constructing one’s social inclusion.Members of the LearnersMot project  have prepared an on -line Handbook to broaden adult educators’ knowledge and skills needed for understanding  persons in state of functional illiteracy and to work with them.

Duration of the project: 01/11/2017-31/12/2019

The handbook LearnersMot is now available here.

You are kindly invited to read it and respond to the comprehension answers. (Certificates will be issued.)

Dr. Dušana Findeisen is a teacher of English and French language and literature and  andragogue. On her own or jointly with her colleagues she introduced a fair number of innovations in theory and practice in the field of adult education: socio-cultural animation and education for local development, older adult education, Slovenian Third Age University, Summer School for Adult Educators. She contributed to the development of study circles in Slovenia, she co-funded the journal Andragogic Perspectives and is on its editorial board.  For five years she was an Age Platform Europe expert in the field of employment and education of older people, and an external expert of the European Commission in this field. So far she has coordinated and delivered about twenty-five transnational projects. She is currently the Head of the Institute for Research and Development of Education at Slovenian Third Age University. She is vice-president of DANET, Danube Networkers for Europe. She publiahed 5 monographs and several hundred articles. Research areas: community education, older adult education, dyslexia in adults, diversity in companies, but also burn out at work, identity at work, migrations and migrants, integrated counselling for older adults, film education in adult education, pre-reitrement education, socially engaged education of older workers, digital inclusion versus digital exclusion, functional illiteracy, etc. So far she has published 5 monographs and hundreds of articles.