TILE – TOWARDS INCLUSIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING
Jue, 14/11/2013 - Mar, 25/11/2014
The TILE project – Towards Inclusive Learning Environments in Vocational Education and Training was a two-year project (1 October 2011 – 30 September 2013) funded by the European Commission under the Leonardo da Vinci Transfer of Innovation Programme. In the TILE project were twelve partners cooperating from four different countries, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland and United Kingdom. The project was managed by the lead partner in Finland, JAMK University of Applied Sciences.
The aim of this project was to champion inclusive learning environments where students with special education needs enter into working life and further into society with a sense of ownership of their future. During the development process of the indicators, the draft has been piloted in all four partner countries and translated to all four national languages of the project partners. Within the project was the Roadmap also potentially culturally and socially adapted to the local, regional or national setting within the counties participating in the consortium.
The final end product of the TILE project is the Roadmap to inclusion: mapping policies and cultures to champion inclusion for SEN students in vocational education and training. The core of the Roadmap consists of three sets of Indicators: Policy, Culture and Practices. The roadmap in this project is developed by transferring development tool “Index for Inclusion” (by Booth and Ainscow, 2002).
Each of these dimensions has a set of statements designed to assess how inclusive is the institution’s educational situation present and how to bring out the development needs of institution. These series of statements also intend to promote discussion. There is no right or wrong answer response to any of these statements and some are not relevant to your particular setting. The Roadmap is designed so you have the chance to place your response to a scale which will map your own situation to a particular indicator. There is also the space to make any comments you feel are important (perhaps adding additional information, or a justification which supports you response, or posing key questions).
The Roadmap, "A Roadmap to Inclusion of students with SEN for professionals in VET learning environments", should be used by professionals in institutions and organizations. The Roadmap is designed to be versatile. It is provided as printer-friendly PDF document and in the form of Word documents which can be more easily adapted.
Almost as important as the "Roadmap", was to make plans and strategies and share them. During the project were held workshops and other meetings in all partner countries. Those discussions helped them to do familiar each other, perceive cultural differences and, above all, to create a common understanding of inclusive vocational training. More information on project’s website on www.tileinvet.net.
