Archive for the ‘workinglearning’ Category

Remembering Stavros Stavrou, former Deputy Director of Cedefop

February 26th, 2021 by Pekka Kamarainen

Earlier this month I received the sad news from Thessaloniki, Greece. Stavros Stavrou, the former Deputy Director of Cedefop (European Centre for Development of Vocational Training) had passed away. Many years have passed since we worked together in Cedefop, but the memories are still there.

We learned to know each other during the difficult period 1994 – 95, when Cedefop was to be relocated from Berlin (where it was launched in 1976) to Thessaloniki, Greece. I had just started in Berlin as a national seconded expert sent by the Finnish government (during the period when Finland was still a candidate member of the EU). Shortly after my arrival the new management – Director Johan van Rens and Deputy Director Stavros Stavrou started their term of office. From the earlier management only the second Deputy Director Enrique Retuerto continued during the transitional period.

As I remember it, the last year in Berlin was in many respects a turbulent time. The decision to relocate Cedefop (taken by the European Council – the summit of the EU in 1993) was a complete surprise for the Centre. In addition, the change of management caused a lot of uncertainty and anxiety – a major part of experts and other staff members were looking for other employment prospects in other EU services. Moreover, the decision to relocate Cedefop to Greece was a complete surprise for the Greek authorities.

At this point of time it was not easy for Stavros to step in as a newly elected Deputy Director. To be sure, he was already known to Cedeofp as  a prominent Greek expert in the field of vocational education and training (VET). Moreover, having studied in Germany, he had completed his doctoral studies in Berlin with a thesis that compared VET in Greece and Germany. But, the uneasy process of moving Cedefop from Berlin was surely very stressful for him – representing the Cedefop interests vis-à-vis the Greek authorities and explaining the Greek circumstances to other Europeans.

Somehow the difficult preparatory processes were managed and a considerably reduced contingent of Cedefop experts and staff members made the move to the temporary building at the American Farm School campus outside Thessaloniki. Moving from the centre of Brelin to such a peripheral location was quite a challenge. But the nice late summer weather in 1995 and the youth hostel -like intimacy of the temporary building brought the new settlers closer to each other. During this period Stavros and other Greek colleagues in Cedefop did all their best to help us settle down and become familiar with our new environment. Some of us were lucky with the search for a new apartment, others were not so happy and opted for alternative employment prospects in other EU services (in Brussels or Luxembourg).

The new start in Thessaloniki was difficult in many respects. Cedefop got firstly a temporary  building that was not so well equipped. (In the meantime the planning of the permanent building was on its way, but very slowly – siga siga, as the Greeks put it. The number of VET experts and administrative staff that moved to Thessaloniki was very small and it took quite a lot of time to recruit new ones. Therefore, Stavros had to stretch himself to multi-tasking – both regarding the supervision of the VET projects and regarding the monitoring of the contracting processes. So, during this time he may have sometimes appeared moody – launisch as the Germans put it. But, then we had several occasions to witness his sense of humour.

As I see it, Stavros was at his best when representing Cedefop and our work at other European arenas – like EU presidency conferences and the Advisory Forum of the European Training Foundation (ETF). He could then draw on the richness of the projects of that time and make use of his own VET-related expertise.

I personally had the chance to experience the human side of the friendly Stavros during the Kosovo war 1999. I and my daughter were worried of what was happening to the relatives of my son-in-law. Stavros contacted personally the Greek authorities to get information and found a contact person to keep us updated. I still remember the shining face of Stavros when we got the good news that the family had been safely evacuated to a third country.

Finally, when my time in Cedefop was coming to an end, Stavros invited me to a private send-off dinner. We wished each other all the best. It so happened that that was the last time that we met each other on privat terms.

Rest in peace, Stavros!

 

TACCLE4 CPD website presents the end products of the project

February 5th, 2021 by Pekka Kamarainen

During the last few years most of my blog posts have dealt with my contributions to the EU-funded project TACCLE4 CPD. As I have told it several times, the project has developed models and resources to support continuing professional development (CPD) of teachers and trainers with focus on promoting their digital competences. In this respect the project has built upon earlier TACCLE projects that worked directly with active teachers and organised courses for them. The fourth project sought to equip education and training managers and teacher trainers with tools to develop CPD measures and trainingmodels. Moreover, the project extended the scope beyond school-based education to include also the field of vocational education and training (VET).

As I have explained it time and again, our institute ITB (Institut Technik & Bildung) from the University of Bremen was invited as a new partner to the project to cover the field of VET. For this purpose we were well positioned since we had been working with vocational teachers and trainers – in particular in the EU-funded Learning Layers (LL) project. However, during the work it appeared that there was a need to provide separate outputs that focused on the field of VET – in particular when considering the dual system of apprenticeship. From this perspective my blog posts have given insights to this VET-specific work and how it has been received by teachers and trainers in Germany. As I have gone to retirement during the project, I was not so well informed by the progress of the work for other educational sectors. Now I am happy to give an overview on the results of the entire project as the have been published on our website http://taccle4cpd.eu/.

The Webinars – insights into the project

The opening of the website is provided by the webinar section. Our project coordinator Angela has recorded two webinars. The first one gives a quick overview on the project idea and on the achievements.

The Intellectual Outputs – Mindmaps, web resources and supporting reports

The second webinar gives a more detailed overview on the final results and how they have been presented on the website. In this way it becomes transparent that some of the IOs are presented as mindmaps, others as interactive handbooks or collections of web resources, whilst others have been presented as written reports.

The CPD- and VET-related blogs

In addition to the sections that present the results and resources that have been produced the website gives access to blog posts that have documented the work during the project.

So, now we have all the results nicely presented on the project website. Congratulations Angela and the partners!

More blogs to come (but from different perspective) …

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