The 21st-century reality has clearly demonstrated that current pupils will work in jobs that don’t exist right now; most importantly, they are also the ones who will create those jobs. That‘s why this Strategic Partnership has been built up around the firm belief that entrepreneurship, as the project title suggests, does matter as a key competence for lifelong learning.

The Partnership‘s main goal is to develop pupils‘ entrepreneurial skills as a counteract to youth unemployment, and to provide support to their less stressful transition to adulthood. Secondary schools from Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Austria, Portugal and Romania are planning to involve our target groups of teens (aged 14-18) in a number of challenging, mixed-reality activities whose purpose will be to empower them with the competences needed for their various career paths.

In order to achieve our goal, we are targeting the tourism sector as the main job provider in our regions, most of which have the highest rates of youth unemployment in the EU. The whole project will be pupil-centered, with a mixture of cross-curricular and cross-sectoral approaches.

Our target groups of teens will carry out most of the activities in mixed transnational teams, and will be exposed to peer learning and teaching, self-assessment, as well as to providing critical feedback. They will have to create learning diaries (via Padlet) where they will register the new skills and competences acquired as a result of their project-based learning.

Europass will help them write structured cover letters and CVs, while their language passports will serve as an entry and final diagnosis of their foreign language progress. Eloquent speech will be a priority objective when it comes to pupils‘ creative writing, debating, or sharing insights during discussions and workshops. Nonverbal body language will be an important criterion in a number of pre-planned activities such as public speech delivery, or giving interviews.

Pupils‘ critical thinking will be boosted through their active participation, and personal contribution, to solving concrete problems, and executing personal assignments. Social media forums will serve as productive spaces for exchanging ideas and generating common working strategies.

Teens will be also involved in a great number of practical activities during the blended mobilities that will, eventually, transform them into self-reliant young entrepreneurs. Teachers‘ role as facilitators will be not only to foster transferable skills, but also to motivate pupils to become self-directed learners in an exciting, non formal, media-based multicultural environment, where everyone will feel important. The key people involved in this Partnership bare the expertise and motivation to produce successful results and sustainable follow-ups.

Some of the methods that will help us meet our goal and objectives include project-based learning, rubrics, peer learning and teaching, problem solving, learning by doing, workshops and public speech. To offer mixed-reality solutions to niche tourism, we will use such online applications as Canva, HP Reveal, TINKERCAD, QR codes, and other hands-on tools.

The backbone of this Strategic Partnership will be our parallel eTwinning project where pupils will learn how to develop their entrepreneurial mindsets. Teens will be engaged in well-structured activities throughout the project lifecycle that will, hopefully, serve as a role model to the largest educational community in Europe.

The six short-term exchanges with pupils will be complimentary, but decisive for getting first-hand impressions from other countries’ idiosyncrasies, and for providing an objective feedback on the realised activities. The combination of these two interdependent strategies will result in achieving the Partnership‘s goal, and its main objectives:

  • To develop clear strategies, vision and impact of entrepreneurship in the tourism sector
  • To develop pupils’ growth mindsets, digital literacy and language learning
  • To foster cultural diversity, inclusive schooling, and active democratic citizenship
  • To promote partner regions as attractive tourist destinations.

Some dissemination channels we will use involve:

  • the Erasmus+ Project Results platform
  • School Education Gateway
  • eTwinning
  • the project and school websites
  • YouTube project channels
  • parents and local communities
  • social media

Longer term results include:

  • sustainable outcomes and follow-ups
  • a working guidelines to pupils‘ future careers
  • commitment to transnational cooperation and internationalisation of education
  • contribution to local tourism infrastructures
  • friendships for a lifetime.

To sum up, lots of stakeholders will benefit from our final results and ideas on how virtual and augmented realities can boost niche tourism, but mostly – our target groups of e-Mates, since the infusion of intelligent edge and the intelligent cloud with mixed reality will dictate our millennials‘ future employability.