Creative planning of a meaningful life through the appraisal of interests and desires

The project addresses the situation of marginalized or disadvantaged citizens who feel excluded from society because they are out of work. A great amount of the persons affected tend to isolate themselves and do not regard their life as meaningful without work. Therefore it is important to assist them in appraising their interests, wishes, dreams and desires and to plan the use of these intentions outside the labour market in order to live a meaningful life. This project is crucial because a lot of unemployed people participate in schemes which should help them to improve their situation within the labour market. Despite their endeavours and the progress they achieve during the course they do not arrive at entering the labour market because there are not enough jobs on offer. In order to avoid that these people feel excluded from society and start to isolate themselves it is important that they are assisted in discovering their interests, wishes, dreams and desires and in finding out about options for their realisation outside the labour market. Through such assistance the persons affected are supported in living a meaningful life sometimes even independent of gainful employment. They should be supported in creative planning of this particularly because the conditions they live in have often lead to passivity. The outcomes of the project aim at stimulating them to take part in this creative planning to give them the opportunity to address their interests and desires which may have become tacit. The persons affected might find out that engagement in network building, care for children or the elderly or even engagement in sports clubs suit their interests if they feel not to have enough opportunities to find a paid job. The project aims at developing a course module for adult education which supports them in the above.

Aims

• to develop a course module for adult education which supports the target group in opening up for themselves new ways of living a meaningful life through designing the module in such a way that it helps in creative planning of meaningful activities outside gainful employment in order to combat tendencies to slip into passivity.
• to create for this module situations and activities structured according to Holland´s six types of personality and respective areas of possible future activities, matched with the cultural opportunities and traditions against the background of intensive field research.
• to compare the different cultural features of future activities between the participating countries and to try to match them as far as possible.
• to develop, based in part on the grounded theory of Glaser/Strauss, a truly interactive ICT-tool which supports the people concerned in appraising their interests, wishes, dreams and desires in relation to possible future meaningful activities based on reflecting the situations and activities mentioned above.
• to design the ICT-tool in such a way that it can be applied throughout Europe by using the most innovative forms of interactivity.
• to provide the tool (for dissemination) in each language of the participating countries, keeping as much similarity as possible and taking into account the cultural specifications where necessary.
• to design in a similar way a comprehensive interactive guide (on CD-Rom) for practitioners in adult education courses which explains the developing of those situations and activities and the usage of the ICT-Self-Evaluation tool.
• to produce for dissemination this guide also in each language of the participating countries.
• to evaluate in a further step the application of this innovative approach (the situations and activities as well as the participants´ tool and the guide) in adult education courses through field research.
• to disseminate the project results through seminars, through course material and through consultancy activities to a wide European audience, including publications in journals addressed at practitioners, scientists and particularly policy makers and charity organisations as planners of the envisaged courses.
• to produce a final report which is summing up the theoretical foundations and includes the results of formative evaluation as well as recommendations for further development, to be published as a book.

Impact

The first impact of the project is that the target group directly affected can achieve immediate stimuli how to lead a meaningful life, even for some time independent of gainful employment through the developed module. They can gain motivation which might lead to engagement in social interaction, citizenship activities or leisure interests. Through this support process the danger of social exclusion or of heading to the edge of society  are reduced. The second impact of the project is to relieve the teachers and trainers working in adult education as well as continuing education for unemployed people and people in precarious work conditions from the excessive demand to transfer all participants to the labour market. It provides a truly new way of dealing with the problem that there will not be enough jobs for all European citizens in the near future.

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