Dušana Findeisen, PhD, Slovenian Third Age University, and DANET e.V.
Abstract: This is the title of the new EU Eramsus+ project coordinated by Edensol, Spain. Why is the project, co-funded by Erasmus+ programme needed?
A great number of older people and workers are low educated and therefore need to be attracted to adult education. Low literacy connected, though not exclusively, to lower older people’s educational attainment has a direct impact on work and productivity of the company. Workers who can not read safety instructions are more at risk at work. Functional illiteracy of the labor force may lead to low-quality products or services. A worker may change labels by mistake thinking that colors of the labels are not important, or may follow wrongly written instructions because he/she cannot check if they are right or wrong. A low educated and low literate worker does not know what his/her role is in a chain of operations. Therefore any change makes such workers feel uncomfortable and anxious. Low literate workers cannot be expected to produce customized products or services. Low literates want to stay where they are, even if they may lose their job since their workstation is threatened by computerization and robotization.
While most adult educators are rather versatile dealing with students with higher levels of educational attainment, they may not know what to expect and how to proceed when they have low literates as students. Adult educators and various practitioners may not be familiar with the phenomenon of low literacy and characteristics of low literate and low educated students(functional illiteracy). They may lack knowledge and skills about motivation and motivating strategies etc. they may not know how low educated learners learn. They may not know how to collect and interpret students’ life histories due to which the students have ended up as functionally illiterate. They might not know how to gain their students confidence. If low educated students become more confident, they forget about their aversion towards changes and can stay in education and keep their job.
For this reason, the ultimate goal of this project is to elaborate readily available learning and teaching strategies: knowledge, approaches, face -to -face and online methods and formats (webinars), techniques helping adult educators to train low educated 45+ workers, trigger and maintain their primary motivation for learning.