Most of us can do more than we think. Often it is a case of raising awareness and re-framing.
In the case of the many people who have spent years running a household,it is about how those skills could easily translate into an entrepreneurial setting. This is what we were attempting in the M-HOUSE project, to identify those skills with the most potential for transfer, getting people to recognise that they had these skills, giving them some tools to make it easier to exercise those skills and helping them to become aware of how those skills could apply in an employment or small business context. These are the tangible benefits of working across cultures.
The result was an online course called Business Skills Explorer when participants could discover they had skills in:
- financial management
- long term planning
- conflict resolution
- product sourcing
- event planning
- customer care
- resource management
- purchasing
- personal development
At the final meeting of the project in Brussels earlier this month we had the pleasure of meeting face to face three of our online graduates and Jeanne van Poppel from the Netherlands was kind enough to get on the podium and tell our specially invited audience about the effect the course had had on her. For me this was the highlight of the evening as Jeanne talked about exercising her English in order to participate, her joy at finding some useful tools to make her job easier and her motivation to implement a couple of big new projects in her life. This type of testimonial really brings to life the value of a trans-European course such as this. Jeanne was especially grateful to her fellow course colleagues across the continent who debated, worked and supported each other through the nine modules.
What now?
The project is (nearly) over and we have a ready made course ready to go in Moodle with guidance to aspiring tutors. We also have (very shortly) a tool box of the tools which our participants found so useful added to the website.
We do recognise the need to have the course available in other languages so it will be available in German, Polish, Italian and Romanian too.
If the course is of interest to you as a participant or an institution then it is available to institutions free of charge, while we can guide upcoming participants to their nearest centre.
As for me, my recent discussions with teachers about the culturally responsive classroom has shown a great need for help in conflict resolution (amongst others) and so I will be adapting that module for use with CRT. In the meantime the original conflict resolution module will be available free of charge from my learning platform.