INSPIRING DROPOUTS AND THEIR TEACHERS

TO CONNECT TO LIFELONG LEARNING PRACTICES

Pieter de Vries

, Anabela dos Santos

and Thieme Hennis

Systems Engineering Department, Delft University of Technology, Jaffalaan 5, Delft, The Netherlands

Centro Novas Oportunidades D. Inês de Castro, Alcobaça, Portugal

Keywords: Dropouts, Lifelong Learning, ICT Enhanced Learning Concept, Self-directed, Autonomous.

Abstract: This paper describes the reAct project in which an innovative learning approach is developed and used to re-

motivate the disengaged from education and learning to connect to lifelong learning practices. These

youngsters constitute a considerable social problem in Europe and the aim of the project is to find ways to

recover the intrinsic motivation to learn and thereby improve the opportunities for participation. Essential is

the development of an innovative learning strategy in which the learner is in control of the learning process.

The paper starts with an introduction on the challenge these dropouts pose to the society at large and the

learning strategy developed to cope with this matter. ICT plays a key role in the methodology and links to a

virtual environment similar to social networks, which is user-configurable and based on the concept of the

Personal Learning Environment (PLE). The main research issues are: can reAct change the attitude, what

are the benefits and drawbacks of this self-organized learning approach and do the ICT tools support these

processes. This paper covers the first half of the project and reflects on the first experiences.

1 INTRODUCTION

One of the key challenges in education is learner

motivation. The disconnect between official

curricula and learners’ perceptions and expectations

of what they learn in school is a problem for all, but

affects particularly those who lack motivation.

Together with other factors, this means that these

youngsters do not finish secondary education and

might even lose their skill to learn.

The main remedy to prevent school dropout has

been to develop training programs that address the

problems of this group focusing on practical skills

and some kind of certification. However when the

motivation to learn is not addressed, the effect of

these programs has shown to be rather limited (EC,

2011, p. 16).

The urgency of the problem of early dropouts is

revealed by the individual, social and economic

consequences (EC, 2011). These students are more

likely to be unemployed in the short and long term,

they work in jobs with less employment security,

earn less, face a higher risk of poverty, participate

less in re-training, rely more on social support

throughout their lives and tend to participate less in

elections or other democratic processes. From an

economic perspective the share of jobs available for

low skilled people will decrease from 20% to less

than 15% up to 2020. This means that early school

leavers create long-term costs for societies, and the

social consequences go beyond that with lacking

social cohesion and civic participation.

At presence the percentage of young people that

do not complete compulsory education is especially

high in the South where in Portugal 35,4%, Spain

31%, Italy 19,7%, and Greece 14,8% of the students

drop out of school. But also countries like Holland

11,4% and Austria 10,1% (Eurostat 2008) are faced

with young people leaving school without a

certificate posing considerable challenges to teachers

and trainers, not at least because they are simply not

motivated to learn.

Research suggests that flexible education and

training systems with a variety of recognized

learning pathways and combined with individual and

school-level support offer more educational

opportunities and therefore better chances of

diminishing the risk of early school leave (EC, 2008,

p. 32; Kendall & Kinder, 2005, p. 9; IRIS, 2009, p.

67). It is difficult though in traditional classroom and

training contexts to include the basic meta-cognitive

and critical skills that would allow these learners to

246

Vries P., dos Santos A. and Hennis T..

INSPIRING DROPOUTS AND THEIR TEACHERS TO CONNECT TO LIFELONG LEARNING PRACTICES.

DOI: 10.5220/0003917102460251

In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2012), pages 246-251

ISBN: 978-989-8565-07-5

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

function autonomously in the current society and the

labour market.

The reAct project, an abbreviation for

reactivating teachers and learners, is an attempt to

develop a learning approach using new technologies

in order to improve the prospects and the

employability of these learners, and to develop the

skills of their teachers and trainers, in an area which

is key to the success namely motivation. In each of

the participating countries comparable pilot projects

will be executed and collaboration between the

partners is of utmost importance considering the

strive to develop a sustainable strategy with a

leverage throughout Europe.

2 THE REACT PROJECT

ReAct is a multilateral project within the KA3 ICT

action of the EU Leonardo program. The relevance

of the project is in the KA3 objective "To support

the development of innovative ICT-based content,

services, pedagogies and practice for lifelong

learning". The focus of reAct is on the Leonardo and

Grundtvig contexts. Leonardo involves young and

adult learners who have not completed their

compulsory education. Gruntvig focuses on adults

who are the trainers teaching these learners. The

trainers involved are frequently people who have

come to training after a career in a particular trade,

and they come to the programs to teach the skills of

this trade.

The project work is situated within lifelong

learning contexts and focuses on the use of ICT to

develop an innovative methodological approach that

will motivate learners, and at the same time, help

them to develop their lifelong learning skills. New

technologies offer a potential for other, new

approaches and different elements into the training

context that stimulate the development of changes in

the intrinsic motivation of these learners (Veen, i.e.,

2010).

Implementing a new approach requires attention

on the learners needs but also, vitally, to those of the

teachers who implement the methodology, and the

integration of the approach into existing contexts, to

the extent that the teachers themselves constitute a

prime target group.

2.1 The Goals of the Project

The fundamental goal of the reAct Project is to pilot

and experiment changes in pedagogical approaches

of non-formal education. It aims at reducing the

number of dropouts through leveraging motivation

and agency of learners, in particular the

development of skills that allow them to carry on

learning throughout their lives. Developing ways to

facilitate these is vital for lifelong learning practice

in Europe (De Vries, 2009).

In more detail, the project methodology that is

developed and piloted aims to achieve the following.

a. A change of attitude. The aim is for the learners

to change from being passive subjects, an

attitude instilled by the educational system

throughout their childhood and youth, to being

active. To effect this change students participate

in creative activities, self-defined and self-

directed and relevant and close to their lives.

b. Open minds. It would help to broaden their

perspectives and let them discover other

experiences and points of view of people living

in other environments. European mobility

initiatives have shown the benefits of this kind

of activity. This should not be limited to a

distant abstract knowledge, it is necessary to

promote close relations between people of

different backgrounds through joint

cooperation.

c. Teach them to learn. This includes developing

cognitive skills and critical thinking skills that

enable them to cope independently and

autonomously with social and labour demands.

2.2 The Methodological Approach

The reAct project develops and pilots a

methodological approach that focuses on

collaboration, creativity and learner autonomy as

potential keys to the reactivation of the interest of

learners who have not completed their education. It

is based on investigation and consolidated processes,

taken from informal learning, in which students

"discover" by doing what motivates them, and

through this process take a number of cognitive

skills that allow them to act autonomously, tackling

and understanding the learning situations as new

opportunities (Veen, i.e., 2010).

To configure the methodological approach in line

with the objectives and contexts a three-step

procedure has been followed.

a. Needs analysis. There was an initial study

profile of students in the institutions

participating in the project, in order to adapt the

activities and tools that are proposed in each

environment to their abilities and needs. This

initial study includes interviews with the various

actors in each context, in order to ensure the

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relevance of the action. This study will be

completed by an on-line survey, aimed at a

wider sample of people in this educational

context to provide useful background to contrast

with the result of the interviews.

b. Design of the methodological approach. This

included a general learning concept (next

section) and specific activities on the basis of

the needs analysis and the experience of the

partners in the context of learning and

motivation.

c. Creation of a toolset. Once the study was done,

a collection of social tools (Web 2.0) was put

together, based on the concept of Personal

Learning Environment (PLE) which should be

understood as the collection of online and

offline tools that an individual uses to learn

(Wilson, 2009).

2.3 Evaluation

The particular constellation of the project within an

international field of different locations and

institutions requires a layered research approach that

depends on an active involvement of all the partners.

An evaluation framework has been developed to

allow for a collaborative research action using an

array of procedures. The researching partner, the

Delft University of Technology, does not have direct

access to participating teachers or students, and in

addition language is a significant barrier for

conducting qualitative research. The involvement of

the reAct partners concerns therefore specific

responsibilities:

a. Interviews with teachers: The reAct partners are

carrying out pre-structured interviews with the

teachers involved. The researching partner will

provide the necessary interview formats and

questions

b. Surveys amongst students: The reAct partners

will also distribute survey instruments provided

by the researching partner to the teachers and

students.

c. Regular interviews with the researching partner:

The reAct partners will have regular online

interviews in which the progress of activities

will be evaluated.

The project comprises of two pilot studies, the

first pilot finished in March 2012, the second pilot

ends in July 2012. Both pilot studies deliver six

country based evaluation reports. The first pilot

country report includes results of three

questionnaires among 164 students (avg. #

respondents per questionnaire 135 – 82%), and

several log books and interviews with teachers, and

two final group interviews with teachers and

students. The reports also include content produced

by students and teachers (online and offline) and

personal experiences and testimonials from teachers

and students. A short appraisal of the first

experiences is given in chapter four, focusing on a

selection of overall data and specific know-hows

from Portugal.

2.4 The Project Partners

The consortium comprises seven partners from six

countries with extensive experience in education and

training in Europe and detailed knowledge of the

issues the project seeks to address. The project

partners are national and regional public

administrations (SERVEF, CNO ESDICA),

institutions related to the educational system (Delft

University of Technology) and vocational training

centers (KEK KRONOS, TR2000, TIBS, BFI

TIROL), focusing on the training of young and adult

unemployed and especially the use of new

technologies in the field of education and training.

3 THE LEARNING CONCEPT

ReAct is about developing and evaluating an

innovative and learner-centred approach that makes

use of the learners’ creativity in autonomous

collaborative activity to motivate and engage them,

and help them learn to learn.

Based on earlier work on dropouts, extensive

literature research, and several interviews with

experts and innovators in the field, gave rise to new

insights and led to the following seven principles for

the reAct learning strategy (Hennis, i.e., 2011).

1. Trust: students and teachers must become

confident that their ideas, contributions, and

comments are treated with respect, online as well as

offline. Fostering trust will engender self-esteem of

the students who have most of the time a poor image

of oneself as far as learning is concerned.

2. Challenging: students and teachers get

motivated to learn when they experience or are faced

with challenging, but manageable assignments.

Teachers must ensure learning environments that

offer the context in which students can adopt

personal or group challenges. Teachers should

address topics to study they consider relevant to

research. Hence, assignments teacher suggest should

be negotiable, or assignments should come from

students themselves and teachers should enable

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students to define the relevance related to the

learning goals set out at the beginning of the course.

3. Self-guidance: we must put more trust in

the hands of students to guide their own learning.

Within the boundaries and restrictions of each

individual pilot, teachers must try to allow as much

self-guidance and self-directed learning as possible.

This requires not only a different way of thinking,

but most important: patience. Sometimes, it takes

some time before students get motivated to do

‘something’. Asking questions usually is a better

approach than providing assignments.

4. Collaboration: Students take great interest

in working with others. Teachers support

collaboration through group-based work and regular

feedback moments.

5. Ownership: If students (as well as

teachers) have the impression that they are in control

of the learning they do, there is a sense of

ownership. This is an essential ingredient for

motivation and self-guided learning.

6. Creativity: in creativity one can be honest

and you are able to develop an identity. Through

creative expressions one is able to have an idea

about his or her capabilities and interests, which is

fundamental for maintaining motivation and

discovering one’s talents.

7. Relevance: ownership of learning also

means defining those topics that the learner finds

relevant in life, even though this is not part of the

official curriculum. Teachers should, as far is

possible, allow students to define the topics they

want to learn, research, do. This means that they are

allowed to do a project about anything they are

passionate about, whether it is Cristiano Ronaldo,

learning Spanish, or bio-informatics. The main

objective for teacher is to add relevance and to foster

curiosity about the topics they want to be covered.

Sugata Mitra proved that with no or only limited

guidance, students can learn (Mitra, 2010).

8. ICT enabled: The role of ICT is critical but

not an aim in itself. Using ICT is not about using

tools, but about a different, and better way of

learning. Students can find a huge amount of

valuable learning resources online, they can find and

use free tools to create and share content, and they

can use free environments to communicate in order

to learn collaboratively. The reAct Project is going

to provide a dynamic list of tools that teachers and

students can use and complement. It is available on

Diigo (groups.diigo.com/group/react-project) and

will function as a shared resource to which

participants can contribute.

4 THE PILOTS

During the timespan of the project there are two

pilots. The first focuses on the way the approach

works with the first group, the learners, and the

difficulties and advantages of the approach from

their point of view, and the second pilot will focus

on teachers, and their needs and reactions with

regard to the approach. The second pilot will

incorporate improvements suggested by the first.

The specific groups to be used for the pilots were

selected by the partners a few months previous to the

pilots, as the annual nature of this kind of training

precludes a decision about this at the current time

(18 months before the first pilot). Each pilot

involved a cohort of roughly 15-25 learners and 2-7

trainers, in each country. The total numbers over

both pilots are therefore around 180 learners and 24

trainers.

One of the principal difficulties involved in pilot

projects is that they run the risk of failing to

integrate into the context they arise from, and

become interesting experiments, rather than being

adopted into everyday practice. For this reason

another fundamental objective of the project is to

integrate the methodology for recovering the

motivation to learn into current initiatives. The

activity proposed is intended to function as a launch

platform at the start of an action, with aim of

changing perceptions of learning and hence of the

action.

a. Getting acquainted: In the first stage of

understanding and accepting the proposed

methodological design, a series of activities is

designed to develop familiarity with the

environment, both in its technological and

social aspects. Also, there is a focus on the

development of community among the students

and teachers of the different institutions

participating in the project.

b. Collaborative creative project: In this phase,

participants form teams. They carry out a

project of their own jointly with pupils from

other schools, using the available toolbox (or

their own tools). The goal is to collaborate and

create something unique. The students

themselves who will define what they want to

do, with the only requirement to do so in

collaboration with person (s) from another

center. This process of creative collaboration

will be carried out using the tools selected by

the students with support of the facilitation team

when they so request.

c. Support and reflection: Support will be

available throughout the process, both during

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projects and afterwards. The team of tutors will

intervene whenever it seems appropriate and

timely in order to promote reflection, together

with the students about the process. This will

develop critical thinking skills and

metacognition. As was mentioned earlier this

process works on all three objectives (creation /

empowerment, collaboration, and goal cognition

/ thinking).

d. Collaborative project integration: This phase

begins the process of integrating the project

with the main training activity. The process is

similar to that of the first project, but this time

the requirement is that the project loosely fits

the subject area of the training programme. This

can be negotiated between students and

teachers. These projects will be conducted

within each center, but the final product will be

presented to other centers.

e. Final integration process: At this stage the

activity returns to the objectives and curriculum

of the original training program. The idea

however is that the learners have experienced

other ways of learning and the teachers

observing throughout will have seen the value

of this, and incorporate other approaches in their

teaching (the project team may suggest these)

The new approaches are likely to involve

creative and collaborative activities and

development of meta cognitive skills and

critical thinking.

Pilot 2: The second pilot repeats the first pilot

but while the first focuses on the effects on learners,

the attention in the second pilot is focused on the

teachers involved. Also, based on good and bad

experiences from the first pilot, the approach has

been improved for the second pilot.

5 THE FIRST EXPERIENCES

This section comprises a short reflection on the

experiences half way through the project with some

general data and a review of the know-hows in

Portugal as an example on the national level.

The first pilot had 134 student participants and

20 teachers. There was an equal number of men and

female involved of which 30% were actual dropouts.

Reasons mentioned for dropping out: it was too

difficult (21%), uninteresting (19%), problems with

teachers (11%), with students (8%), problems at

home (8%). Their preferred ways of learning: using

my computer or phone (35%), listening to someone

(34%), reading something (24%), discussing in a

group (19%). Of all 84% believes that a trustworthy

relationship with the teacher and the peer-student is

relevant for better performance, but also the

challenge (71%) and the self-determination (74%) of

what and how to learn and collaboration (83%) play

a decisive role. The relevance of the learning equally

shows to be meaningful (73%) for the respondents

and most (76%) are convinced that the use of

computers will lead to better performance.

Looking at the outcome after finishing the

projects in Pilot 1, 58% of the students believed they

were actively involved and the rest not. Reasons

mentioned were: uninteresting, the relationship with

peers and difficulties with ICT. Most felt they had a

good relationship with their teachers (65%) and their

peers (70%). 40% Felt sufficiently challenged and

58% not, 56% felt self-determined, 42% not.

Collaboration was good (61%) and a majority felt

that things learned were relevant (72%) to them.

84% Considered the use of computers very relevant.

Most of the respondents (54%) though did not feel

that the project helped them well to prepare for an

internship or job. On the other hand they felt that

(66%) the pilot had improved their capacity to

connect and communicate with others, but not

necessarily improved their confidence (40%). Not

unimportant was the fact that the overall

appreciation of the course was rather positive (69%).

The experiences in Portugal are used as an

example of how the world looks like behind the

numbers. This information is based on the national

report, which is developed by each participating

country, summarizing the experiences and together

with the other resources part of the knowledge pool

for further evaluation.

The first Pilot in Portugal took place at a

Secondary School in collaboration with a Centre for

New Opportunities. The context for the pilot was a

course of adult education and training. The target

group was composed of eleven young adults (18-25

years), all drop outs from secondary education. The

pilot started with the familiarization of the seven

participating teachers with the reAct concept while

using this concept as the organising principle for this

warming up. This was needed to create an

atmosphere of trust among the teachers and increase

their acknowledgement of the concept.

In the end nine students completed the course.

During the familiarization phase it became clear that

students could handle the main tools quite easily,

that they liked the idea of international collaboration

and discovered with enthusiasm that the social

network used (Facebook) provided them with the

means to create a project community. Students were

less successful in their collaboration efforts than

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anticipated due to language issues, but were pleased

by the fact that they were self-directive in their

project work. One of them discovered during this

phase his affection for photography which led to a

very positive change in attitude. Overall, autonomy

seemed to be an important motivating factor and

students appear to be more confident about their

present and future success. The reAct concept is not

yet an accepted way of moving forward or

completely ready to be integrated in the regular

learning processes, the teachers though are very

much aware of this innovative way of teaching as a

mode to promote lifelong learning skills.

6 CONCLUSIONS

It is still too early in the project to define the

ultimate conclusions, but some assumptions can be

made. It is clear that the reAct learning concept

changed the attitude of the learners and teachers

with regard to learning. Learners are positive about

the approach and feel that it opens up opportunities

for further personal growth. Teachers get a better

feel for and see more possibilities for promoting

learning. The time period and the intensity of the

reAct pilot does not yet allow to say something

about particular benefits or drawbacks of self-

organized learning, but the results show that students

appreciate the confidence this approach mitigates

and value the opportunity to experience autonomy. It

is clear that ICT is considered an important carrier

for the execution of the reAct learning approach. Not

just as a tool, but as an instrument to attain goals set

by yourself in collaboration with others, allowing

you to communicate freely and deliver products that

arose from your own motivation.

So far the results are promising, but not yet

enough apparent to draw vital conclusions.

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