Summary of EUROPROF

1. Project title

   EUROPROF - The European Foreign Language Teacher Professional Profile and Portfolio, is a Comenius 2.1 project which concerns initial teacher training and aims to develop a professional profile of the future European foreign language teacher. The Comenius 2.1 project encompasses a Comenius 2.2 funding request for student tachers’ mobility.

2. Summary of the project

   Objectives, Target groups, Main activities and Expected outputs

   The project lays the foundation for a cooperation among initial teacher training institutions in different countries to work on a new professional profile of the future foreign language teacher at European level, as today s/he has to face new challenges in education (competences and technologies) and to cope with learners’ special needs (differentiated didactics and autonomy).

   The people involved in the project are:

   • the educational staff of the partner institutions who plan, organise and control the whole process;
   • the student teachers who will take an active part in the planning and implementation, and will do part of their training abroad, thus greatly improving their language and cross-cultural competences;
   • the teachers in host secondary schools (serving as mentors/tutors*[The teachers in lower and upper secondary schools who host trainees are called either mentors (in most European countries) or tutors (in Italy), that is why this combination of terms (mentor/tutor) is used in the application form to define this figur] for the trainees) who will benefit from the activities, materials and results coming out of the experience.

   The main activities/phases of work (which constitute also the key words of the project) are as follows:

   • Knowledge and exchange: the European partner institutions are willing to analyse in depth their own initial teacher training system (the relationship among university, school, society) and to get to know the others in order to share ideas, perceptions, didactic practices;
   • Analysis and awareness: of the differences (in terms of educational systems and teaching styles) and of the necessity to develop and acquire intercultural competences.
   • Active investigation and implementation: research, use of indicators and development of tools; mobility of the staff and student teachers.
   • Evaluation (subjective and objective): a positive attitude of critical comparison and control of the results; results publication and diffusion.

   The eight partners in the project who work on initial teacher training and have different and valid expertise in this field, all feel the need to enhance the knowledge and skills of their educational staff as well as to offer their students the chance to acquire a European dimension. That is why this Comenius 2.1 project is also a framework inside which a Comenius 2.2 is asked for trainees’ granting in anticipation of their mobility.

   As the project lasts three years, the first two will mainly be dedicated to the knowledge, exchange and production of materials for teacher training observation, monitoring and evaluation (such as the European Portfolio). In the second year student teachers’ mobility will start: it will be adequately prepared, supported and monitored in order to be better developed and amended in its course. The third year will be more devoted to refining the products, testing the results, evaluating and laying the new foundations for further contacts among the institutions and for the possible and desirable continuation of students’ mobility.

   Our major interest throughout the project and at the very end of it would be to disseminate the results in different ways: the creation of a website, the publication of a Handbook with the European Portfolio and all the materials produced, press releases at significant points in the life of the project, seminars and launch events to which educational authorities and local boards will be invited, publication of reports and papers in specific journals, conferences/ seminars for the educational staff of the university and of secondary schools.