Etwinning

E5 Entrepreneurship Education

Title of Project: E5 Entrepreneurship Education

Project Coordinator: Jorge Mora Salinas

Centre: IES Leonardo da Vinci, Valencia

Age Range: 16 to 19 years

Links to the project materials: TwinSpace

E5 Entrepreneurship Education is a Comenius / eTwinning Project. It aims to encourage pupils to be more enterprising and to promote international collaboration between member centres and colleagues.

Six countries participated in the project and reflected on the judicial norms for companies, employment contracts and aspects of legislation related to employment in general. The pupils learnt how to design a financial plan and to recognise commercial opportunities and the possibility of sales in a global market. The aim of the project was to raise awareness of problems related to the maximisation of profit and the exploitation of the work force. The project has, without doubt, contributed to the pupils' understanding of the differences in legislation in the various participating countries. The pupils learn to accept and to value cultural differences; to rid themselves of prejudices; and to apply the knowledge acquired in their Economics and Information Technology classes.

Jorge Mora, the Coordinator of the Project in the IES Leonardo da Vinci in Alicante, describes the project and outlines its objectives, the difficulties, the solutions and conclusions and the benefits it has given to the participants.

The Development of the Project and its Objectives

The project consists of stimulating the entrepreneurial spirit of the pupils in our educational centres. We are associated and working with six different countries: Germany, Denmark, Iceland, Luxemburg, The Czech Republic and Spain. Right from the beginning of the project we introduced the concept of the entrepreneur as an idea that goes further than benefits for companies. Our aims are that the companies maintain themselves economically but also provide some services to society, particularly to the most disadvantaged sectors of the society. During the last two years we have studied the creation of new companies. For the first year, the team considered activities which promoted creativity. During the second year, after having chosen a winning idea, the team established the creation of an international company that would develop the project and distributed the tasks between the six countries.

In the case of Spain, the idea was to create a company called INTERLIVE, S.L., that had a social objective to provide for people who, for one reason or another, had become immigrants in our country. We aimed to provide support for them in many different ways, such as: to help them with their language difficulties and to adapt to different customs. The winning idea came from Luxemburg: a company offered a product which respected the environment. A real product was developed and commercialised. The Luxemburg team was responsible for supply; the team from The Czech Republic did the marketing and publicity; the German team took responsibility for sales; Denmark did the accountancy; Iceland became the human resources specialists; and Spain became the central management team.

All of these activities were developed by simulating real cases, with real units of production, real purchases and authentic documentation. The international and national parts of the company came into existence at the same time as if they were parts of a chain. In the meetings which were held in each participating country, it became very interesting to see different ways of confronting and dealing with the tasks/activities which varied from country to country.

In order to maintain contacts between each different country a newsletter/bulletin was published every two months. In each bulletin, each participating country exchanged information related to the progress of the project. On completion of the two year project, each team had to complete a report and this is when we realised the enormous amount of work which had been covered. We believe that all our objectives have been satisfied. In addition, we believe that many other additional objectives have been satisfied too, such as: interculturality, tolerance, linguistic competences in many diverse languages and establishing new international contacts which have led to other projects.

The Development of the Project: its successes, errors, difficulties and solutions

The project was carried out by all the pupils and teachers from all the departments. Everybody participated in the creation of the company idea: the bimonthly bulletin; the Skype communication; the Facebook and Google contacts; the production of videos etc. The most positive aspect of the project was the idea that a company would provide valuable services to a society. Other positive aspects were: the development of international, personal and cultural bonds that lead to a healthy working climate of tolerance.

The main difficulty was working as a company on a national and international level. This created difficulties related to publicity and sales etc. The solution to these difficulties came from a special meeting which took place in Luxemburg. The teams decided to create an international organisation chart in order to be able to cope with the types of problems that might arise. This helped the development of the second year of the project.

The Value of Participation

The members of the project were determined to work well as a group and to distribute each task fairly. The distribution of the tasks amongst the countries and the distribution of tasks within the teams was a success. It was a good decision to distribute the tasks amongst countries instead of amongst pupils and teachers. Normally communication difficulties arise but, in this  project, we were able to resolve these problems quickly and efficiently and we continued to achieve good results and to reach our targets.

The involvement of the pupils and other groups related to the educational community

All of the groups have contributed to the development of the project and participated in all the activities and proposals. The participation of the pupils has been highly significative since they have coped with all the challenges enthusiastically. In the case of the Spanish team, the  creative phase was very special, everybody wishes to contribute their ideas since the pupils recognised that their ideas could help real people in today's society. Society could be a little better thanks to their ideas and enthusiasm.

The teachers always approached the project with enthusiasm. They dealt with the tasks creatively frequently adding new challenges and new ideas in order to make the project more creative and appealing to the pupils.

What have been the benefits and the impact of the project on the educational centres?

The benefits of the project for the centre have been numerous and can be appreciated from many different viewpoints. From the point of view of the teachers: it has been a period of initiation in terms of international contacts and the use of idiomas; it has encouraged new ways of working collaboratively in multidisciplinary teams (since a large part of the teaching staff did belong to the Economics or Administration departments). For the pupils, the project has brought down linguistic and cultural barriers. Clichés and generalisations have been removed, to be replaced by friendship and companionship. As far as the parents of the pupils are concerned: the project helped to erradicate fears about their children moving within a world which is more open and full of opportunities abroad.

Quality of materials and the reuse of materials

All of the materials generated by the pupils and teachers have been uploaded and stored on the eTwinning platform. They are available to the public and can be used for other projects in the future. The fact that all the materials have been uploaded on to the EST (European Shared Team) means that they can be consulted from any place in the world.

What has it meant to win a national prize?

When the project ended in June 2014, I wanted to keep a record of everything that we had achieved. I began to appreciate the amount of work, the attention to detail and the thoroughness of  each contribution. I felt proud of having participated and collaborated with all the national and international teams in a project of this nature. Winning the national prize was recognition of all the work which the teams did, their dedication went further than the timetable or the awards that they might receive. The prize in itself has been to participate and to form a part of this project. The prize given by the National Support Service for eTwinning means that what we have accomplished over the last two years has been worthwhile and of a high standard. Thank you to everyone....without your collaboration it would not have been possible.

Source of images: The heading of SNAeTwinning. The body of the photographs submitted by Jorge Mora.