Learning Layers goes to Bau-ABC Rostrup – Part 1: What are we looking for?
Next week the Learning Layers (LL) project will have its consortium meeting in the Bremen region. However, the venue will not be the University of Bremen nor any hotel or conference centre nearby. Instead, we have chosen to arrange the consortium meeting on the premises of our application partner Bau-ABC in Rostrup. In this way we will place our discussions and working sessions to the same neighbourhood, where apprentices are trained for construction sector and full-time trainers (working together with companies) are supporting their work process-oriented learning.
Looking back, most of the previous LL consortium meetings have been arranged on university campuses or neighbouring hotels (Barcelona, Helsinki, Graz, Innsbruck, Aachen) and once in a remote conference location (Paphos). All these meetings and the choices of venues had their reasons which I do not want to bring into discussion afterwards. For me the point of interest is, what kind of new experiences and learning gains can we make now that we arrange or meeting at Bau-ABC?
Indeed, we have been already once before with a big group of LL partners during the Application Partner Days in January 2013. At that time the project was carrying out its initial empirical studies and very little could be brought into discussion regarding the co-design processes. Instead, our main task was to get adequate picture of the main activities carried out in the host organisations and share the first impressions with our hosts. In this way the Application Partner Days helped us all further.
Now that we return to Bau-ABC after one and half year we have worked further with the project and there have been many further encounters between Bau-ABC and LL partners. However, we know that our picture of the progress of the LL project is different – depending on the tasks, sectors and cooperation experiences we have had. Also, we know that even if we in the Bremen region have put much effort to share our knowledge and experiences (via reports, notes and blogs) this doesn’t immediately turn into lived knowledge development across the project.
Therefore, we are looking forward to this LL project consortium meeting as an opportunity to real encounters with our application partners. We also hope that we can deepen the picture of shared learning experiences we have made with Bau-ABC staff in our fieldwork. And furthermore, we hope that the way we have planned the work of this meeting helps us to get new insights into co-design, stakeholder engagement and into scaling up of innovations.
More posts to come …
