What about the other members team behind ENTOS project? Let’s discover who they are and what ENTOS means for them in their own words.
ENTOS project is the result of the passion that the partners have for the education, especially when the innovation plays a crucial role.
In the previous article we told you about ENTOS' origins. In this second article we are going to describe you the point of view of the other partners that joined the project: Renata Košovičová, Justina Civilyte and Babis Samantzis University of Thessaly, to talk about their experience.
Enjoy your reading!
Renata, Justina, which impact do you think this project will have on your students and teachers?
Renata: We are a typical vocational school having the same needs and difficulties as most such schools across Europe. We are facing challenges like improving the quality of VET and increasing motivation of young people to study. We have been trying to find a way to connect VET with general education that has been underestimated by our students for years. This has been visible especially in sports lessons. Students are not interested in physical activities and avoid attending them. The project is a great tool to find some balance between both fields of education. We expect it to offer students a necessary dose of motivation. It will help them to acquire not only entrepreneurial skills, but life competences as well. This will enable us to enhance and complete the profile of graduates, to connect VET with other parts of education. Moreover, we strongly believe that students will get aware of this fact and will get more motivated. And, of course, we expect a growing number of students attending PE lessons and enjoying physical activities.
Justina: When I first heard about the idea of the project connecting two words "sports" and "entrepreneurship" it sounded challenging and complicated to unite them both for the same goal. As well as Slovakian school we experience similar difficulties involving youngsters into physical education lessons even though it would be very healthy and useful for them to do exercises especially when they spend quite a lot of time with their smartphones and PC.
This project will give fantastic opportunities for the youngsters to see the PE from different perspectives and moreover to gain essential and important competences focused for entrepreneurship. Unity of sports and entrepreneurship is going to affect various fields of education for young people.
Babis, considering the research UTH is doing, do you think the ENTOS formation can be included in the academic path of Physical Education students and future teachers of this subject as Initial Teacher Training? If yes, how do you imagine it?
The ENTOS program aims at introducing and in some cases strengthening the Entrepreneurial Education subject in the educational environment of European school students. The participation of the University of Thessaly as a partner in the ENTOS program aims at the management of the research. The ENTOS project aims at learning and developing the entrepreneurial skills and abilities of students during their participation in the Physical Education course. Experiential participation in the courses of Physical Education and Sports is the main body for building by students’ values and skills such as: self-control, initiative, confidence, cooperation, creativity, communication. All of these learning objectives of the Physical Education course are at the same time values and skills of Entrepreneurial Education that every school student in Europe should be taught. Therefore, the curricula of the Departments of Physical Education and Sports at Universities should be enriched with the philosophy and skills of Entrepreneurship, in order to help future Physical Education teachers to implement multiple programs in Sports and Entrepreneurship activities in their schools. This could be achieved in two ways. With the innovative introduction to existing theoretical courses of the curriculum of the Departments of Physical Education, such as Sport Management and Leisure Marketing by adding experiential / practical team building courses in open spaces with the aim of the application of entrepreneurial skills such as leadership, decision making process, teamwork, negotiation. In this way students will better understand the relationship between management theory and applications in everyday life and the free labor market. The reverse is also true. In other words, in the existing courses of the curriculum of the Departments of Physical Education that teach either sports or outdoor recreational activities, additional emphasis should be given to teaching and cultivating the 15 entrepreneurial skills of the EntreComp program, so that students can be trained. adequately prepared to become tomorrow’s successful professionals in the united European labor and entrepreneurship market.
To read the first part of the article, click on this link.