F.A.S.T.E.S.T. “Food & Agroindustrial Schools Toward Entrepreneurship by Storytelling & digital Technology”

A new international project.

Cisita Parma is looking for Partenrs for a new European Project “Erasmus +”, “ Kay Action 2 (KA2): Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices”.

The project aims to develop and implement at European level innovative approach / teaching tools (able to combine the practice of “Storytelling” to the digital skills for the creation of Hypervideos) to the theme of entrepreneurship.

The project intends to focus on the agri-food sector as a fruitful ground for the realization of innovative business projects.

Developing Hypervideos, from videos that tell “stories of enterprise” and “stories of entrepreneurs” of the agri-food industry (with close relationship between schools and the protagonists of the local economy, whose entrepreneurial skills have shaped the history of the territory and which are important to appreciate in terms of telling and testimony), or through the enrichment of the testimonies narrated with links that: – allow personalized navigation between different sequences of the video itself; – refer to multimedia material, will allow students to experience firsthand the skills necessary to carry out a project not only “new” but “innovative”. The use of such Hypervideos as OER (Open Educational Resources) allow direct knowledge of the agro-food chain, also in terms of genesis and specificity; their implementation will enable a real “learning by doing”.

The “Entrepreneurial skills” will be examined/explored through narration (effective to stimulate symbolic projections in students) and “act” by the construction, on the basis of the narration itself, of Hypervideos (meaning “multimodal tales”), that teachers can integrate within a didactic scenario focusing both on the sector skills related to local production chain, on the transversal ones (entrepreneurial mind-set skills), and on the digital ones.

Strengths of the project

Participatory practices and the opportunity for students to contribute to formal educational curriculum with their creations, contributing to a progressive intergenerational contamination of languages, styles and content, will definitely increase the appeal and interest during the formal educational path, also as a method to address the problem of ESL (Early School Leaving).

This project will make also possible a dialogue between schools and companies able to prevent any gap in professional knowledge, useful to the fulfillment of innovation efforts required in an evolving industrial sector – in terms of supply chain, change in consumer habits, willingness to develop new products, technological process factors emerging (transport, production, storage).

The VET system will increase its attractiveness, expand its training offer and modernize their teaching approaches, reduce cases of ESL by increasing student motivation, better qualify their teaching staff (refer to either the digital skills that those entrepreneurial), become more strongly rooted in the territory in strengthening the relationship with the socio-economic context.

Business owners / managers of the industrial agribusiness sector, finally, can recover the link with its own history, its own “winning” characteristics and, at the same time, strengthen the link with the territory – VET systems – and with the new generation of potential entrepreneurs (role of “virtual business angels”) or workers.

 Target groups of the project:

1)      Staff and students of VET institutions (post-secondary and tertiary level apart from Universities) related to agrifood industrial sector/chain

2)      Associations representing businesses and workers in the sector

 Positive impact on each territory:

The beneficiaries of the project (students, teachers, entrepreneurs) are placed in a circular, virtuous relationship in which all the actors are involved in the construction of an intersubjective knowledge – “knowledge sharing“.

 Multi-stakeholder involvement (VET students and teachers, a creative company of ICT sector, entrepreneurs / workers) relating to a specific industrial sector, connotative of the territories and economic scenarios of the partner countries, gives substance to a project capable of anticipating the future, and accelerates the transformation of modern society encouraging rather than preventing self-employment.