Methods

Impulse lecture is slightly different from a standard lecture. Its focus is to motivate older citizens for active participation in the civil society on EU-matters and in actively shaping the environment they live in and to present some thematic areas on national and international levels as impulses for the national citizens’ panel sessions.

The main objective is to live real life situations that happen at personal level in people’s everyday life. Classes were created to teach the  foreign language to the participants using the teaching framework defined I. the Discussion Groups. The target group of the project was formed by adult students, part of U3A Italy, Lithuania, France, Finland.

It is a method that tends to form working groups of people with different opinions or with different professionalisms, who come together and work together in a coordinated manner to face and solve a problem that could not be solved individually by the individual components. The lifespan of a working group can last between a few months and several years.

Lifelong learning of people of every age group, also old adults, is not a luxury but a social necessity. The method serves to consolidate or apply knowledge, skills and competencies in practice. It consists of deliberately carrying out certain actions and repeating them in order to form and improve one or other skills and habits. The character and the methodology of their application depend on the specific curriculum, as well as on the level of preparation and development of elderly learners.

The authors collected national data on active ageing concerning national policies, providers of education in later life, good practices. They also gave the definition of active ageing as it has been accepted on the national level. The national reports were compiled and data were compared in the so called European report on active ageing.

80 hours of in-company training, enables participants to apply newly acquired knowledge in order to help them have better social integration and integration to countries labour market. This part of the project is important because of integration into the labour market. In-company training is regular part of continuing vocational education and training and this method is very important for work experience of participants, improvement of their practical skills (vocational, social, language). In this project this is also part of social inclusion process and improvement of employer’s awareness about their social responsibilities and opportunities for working with immigrants.

Key goals of this method is to transmit knowledge, to inform about national culture, to motivate participants to be active members of society. This method was developed for female immigrants from third countries who have only basic reading skills in host country language. This method includes improvement of listening, speaking, reading, writing skills of host country language and basic information about culture, heritage, social background and other information needed for social inclusion. Participants live in host country, they have basic listening skills but they are still not integrated because of social distance, low speaking, reading, writing skills and lack of professional skills. This method is combination of traditional language course, course about basic cultural information and motivation training. Participants have gained basic knowledge of the host societies language (Croatian), history, and institutions and this is indispensable for integration