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The Crossroads project, from the UVic-UCC’s CEIG, now has a draft guide to best practices

Meeting of Crossroads project

The Crossroads project, from the UVic-UCC’s CEIG, now has a draft guide to best practices

The four partners in the European Crossroads project, led by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (CEIG) at the UVic-UCC, held their third working meeting on 21 January of this year. The session enabled the participants to further their exchange of social and educational practices geared at lowering early school drop-outs and to evaluate the first draft of the guide to best practices for professors which they are preparing, along with a compilation of tools and methodologies. In addition to the UVic-UCC, Udraga Za Ljudska Prava and Gradansku Participaciju (Croatia), Fundacja Laboratorium Zmiany (Poland) and Pour la Solidarite (Belgium) are also participating in this project on lowering school drop-out rates in post-compulsory education.

“At this meeting, we reviewed, debated and saw how we could improve this draft guide, which all the project partners now have, so they can make contributions and it can be finished by February”, says project coordinator Mar Binimelis. The goal is to work practically on the guide’s content with different focus groups in March, April and May. These focus groups will be made up of instructors and youths from the different countries participating in the project, all of whom should complement each other. For example, the participants will include secondary school students, university students, secondary school teachers, university professors and even a partner who works with youths living in conflictive or difficult situations.

The draft guide to best practices – a document that is slated to be available by the summer of 2021 – is made up of a first part that is more theoretical, which outlines the reasons for early school drop-out while also addressing gender, empowerment and other issues from an intersectional perspective. The second part of the guide is more practical, with a compilation of a diverse series of activities and resources so teachers can apply them in their respective settings.

The next meeting of the Crossroads project will be before the summer in Barcelona. However, depending on the status of the epidemic at the time, it may well be held online, just as this last meeting was, which was supposed to have been held in Croatia to strengthen relations among the partners. The project launch meeting was held one year ago now, in January 2020, and Crossroads is scheduled to continue until 31 January 2022.

The purpose of the Crossroads project is to share similar methodologies and experiences that have been developed in other European countries to deal with the problem of drop-outs from post-compulsory education once students have completed secondary school, including baccalaureate, vocational education programmes and the university. The reasons can touch on different kinds of inequalities such as gender, background, social class, ethnicity and sex. The team coordinating the project, which is financed by the European Commission’s Erasmus+ call for applications, is comprised of Mar Binimelis from TRACTE; Gerard Coll-Planes from GETLIHC; Núria Simó from GREUV; Gloria García-Romeral, a research assistant and project manager; and Rita Sarda, a CEIG scholarship recipient.

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