Context/background of project:
According to EUGE (European Institute of Gender Equality), the term Marginalized Groups is used to address groups of people within a given culture, context and history at risk of being subjected to multiple discrimination due to the interplay of different personal characteristics or grounds, such as sex, gender, age, ethnicity, religion or belief, health status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, education or income, or living in various geographic localities. https://eige.europa.eu/thesaurus/terms/1280.

A multitude of articles and actions can be found within the pages of the commission’s website, indicating that the need to find means to integrate those persons living on the margins of society has been identified and attempts to include them are at the forefront of EU policy (indicative titles: Socio-Economic Integration Of Marginalized Communities, Fighting Marginalization, Inclusion Of Vulnerable Groups). It is commonplace that persons belong to more than one marginalized group, as society raises its barriers towards any difference.

Education is rightly considered to be a basic human right, without which sustainable social and economic development is rare. Nowadays the trainers are called to pass on educational information on crucial topics to an increasing number of marginalized groups; there are many projects aiming to facilitate the inclusion of minorities such as Roma, upskilling projects targeted at NEET and low-skilled individuals, organizations trying to tend to the needs of an increasing number of immigrants and refugees. The raw fact is that the majority of Adult Trainers in the EU have little to no experience with teaching marginalized groups, as each group has diverse reasons to enroll to a training course, needs a different approach to embrace its training and has a different “learning curve”.

In this project, we propose a number of LTT Activities where trainers of the institutions involved will jointly discuss the topic of educational approaches and good practices on different marginalized groups. The scope of these LTTAs is to allow for discussions and exchange of experiences and practices between trainers of the participating institutions; each institution will send two adult trainers to participate and present the organization’s experience and actions on the particular topic.
The participants will compare educational experiences and discuss the solutions utilized to overcome barriers which impeded their work on the particular topic; open discussion and solution comparison will indicate the best practices to be used by the institutions. The topics are Difficulties in the learning process encountered with: Refugees-Immigrants-Minorities, learners of older-age, NEET and Unemployed persons.

This project concerns a number of target groups, direct and indirect. Firstly, the participating institutions and their trainers are the main targets, as they will participate and discuss issues and experiences collected during the organizations’ function. Secondly, adult trainers and stakeholders of the networks of the participating organizations, and in spread, the organizations’ country’s adult trainers and stakeholder institutions will benefit by being informed of the project and its findings. Thirdly, adult learners of the marginalized groups addressed herein, and those group having similarities with them will benefit as the organizations will utilized the accumulated experience to improve their training routines, thus offering a more effective and valuable learning process.