Kick-off meeting 30th, November – 1st, December 2023
The EU GREEN university alliance bears its first fruits: SLS4TEENS is launched in the University of Extremadura (Spain)
The EU GREEN alliance, which started in January 2023, achieves its first results with the award of several Erasmus+ KA2 projects.
The University of Extremadura has hosted two KA2 project kick-off meetings. The first one was the TECSKILL project (from the Engineering area), coordinated by Extremadura and presented in May in Badajoz and now the Second Language Learning at School for Adolescents (SLS4TEENS), coordinated by the University of Angers (France), which held its kick-off meeting on 30th of November and 1st of December at the University Centre of Mérida (Spain).
The SLS4Teens project has the participation of three universities of the EU Green Alliance: Extremadura (Spain), Magdeburg (Germany) and Parma (Italy), together with the University of Nantes (France). The project, which analyses the role of neurolinguistics in second foreign language learning, has received 400,000 euros funding from the European Commission in the framework of the Erasmus+ programme.
The aim is to test the level of more than 1,000 students. Around 50 volunteer secondary school teachers will be trained in new modules related to interculturality, digital tools, grammar and neuroscience, and half of them will also learn about new approaches in neurolinguistics. There will be modules designed by researchers from the partner universities between November 2023 and February 2025. Teachers and 1,250 pupils will be trained during eight months, divided into two groups: those learning English as a foreign language and those discovering French or German as a school language, will be tested for the first time in September 2025.
TECSKILL is another Erasmus+ project coordinated by the University of Extremadura´s School of Industrial Engineering. The programme will offer specialised training in green and digital skills to doctoral students from the engineering branches. This new international programme will be developed in consortium with three other EU GREEN universities: the University of Gävle in Sweden, the University of Parma in Italy and the University of Évora in Portugal. TECSKILL has also been funded by Erasmus+ with an amount of 400,000 euros.
The aim is to offer specialised training in green and digital skills to engineering students involved in research, according to Jaime González, a member of the project team at the University of Extremadura. In this way, the University of Extremadura is committed to training these doctoral students in sustainability and digitalisation in order to improve research quality. This is a way of providing this university group with the competences established by the European Union for digitalisation and the fight against climate change.
