Innovative Teaching Methodologies in Hospitality Schools for Inclusive Education

One among the main issues highlighted by the European Commission is to promote inclusive and accessible education, while paying special attention to facilitating the integration of vulnerable stud...

The main goal of the project is to support teachers and trainers in dealing with the challenges that ASD students encounter in the hospitality sector and help them acquire expendable skills and competences both in the education system and the the world of work. The partners, once they have identified 15 emerging Skills and Competences for the hospitality industry, mainly addressed to ASD students, have created a compendium with Flexible and Hybrid Educational Methodology and Tools (F.H.E.M.T.), tailored to the individual’s learning requirements and characteristics.These documents will help teachers assist ASD students in gaining new sector-specific competences, promoting their integration both in and outside the school system, promoting the devolpment of new professional figures in the hospitality sector.

The main activities taken out during the project were as follows: research through interviews, collection of practises, design of the educational application, piloting and validating the application. The research through interviews gave the consurtium the possibility to identify the 15 emerging competences and skills in the hospitality sector (R1). The collection of practises took place thanks to workshops among teachers and researchers in which the 15 methodologies for ASD students were collected then adapted to the hospitality sector (R2). The educational application content was prepared by the partners, aswell as its design (R3). For the piloting test and validation of the app a guideline translated in all the Partner’s languages was prepared and then local training for the use of the app took place. Dissemination has been an important charateristic of all the project, as all the results, TPMs, online meeting have been disseminated on the project’s facebook profile. Not only: every month at least two posts were posted on the topic in order to attract public’s attention.

PR1: Skills and competences Model. Thanks to the collection of semi-structured interviews towards either hospitality sector experts or professionals in dealing with ASD students with specific learning needs, Partners have identified the 15 emerging key skills and competences in the hospitality sector, mainly for ASD students, based on the experiences and needs of the local labour market in 5 different European countries. They are divided into 4 competence areas related to the fields of communication, social emotion, self-management, and technicality. PR2: F.H.E.M.T. -Flexible and Hybrid Educational Methodology and Tools. Each Partner was responsible to identify and collect 3 methodologies, learning approaches and tools for ASD students which refer to the 15 skills and competences identified in PR1. The Partners have so collected 15 existing specific teaching methods and tools, learning approaches and challenges for students with ASD, classifying them on the basis of the leading skill involved, according to the Competence Skills Mapping developed in PR1. PR3: InTeaM4IEd App. It is an App The F.H.E.M.T. (PR2) and the emerging skills and competences (PR1) have been integrated into the developed application.