Abstract:

Six Universities which have worked together in several European Projects have decided to join again for achieving the European intTT project ‘An Integral Teacher Training for Developing Digital and Communicative Competences and Subject Content Learning at Schools’ which deals with initial teacher training in primary and secondary school. The Universities participating are: Alcalá (Spain, coordinator of the project), Comenius of Bratislava (Slovakia), Helsinki (Finland), Lisbon (Portugal), Leicester (United Kingdom) and Teknik Karadeniz University in Trabzon (Turkey).

The general aim is to train future school teachers in order to improve the development of basic competences in school pupils such as communicative and digital competences, using model materials combining language and information technology with scientific and humanistic content across different subjects of the primary and secondary school curriculum. Both basic competences are, among others, key competences required in the world of work.

As it can be seen, we used an integrated methodology which is supposed to make some changes in the approach and attitude of student teachers as future teachers. The question is why the partners of the project have decided to design this methodology. The answer is that project partners are convinced of the need of training teachers with an integrated methodology that takes into account a good command of language to improve communicative competence, the use of technology and digital tools to command ICT and the learning of subject content as something global and not apart, and this is due to several reasons:
- digital and communicative competences have been identified as key competences for lifelong learning
- they are closely related to subject content learning, and also to personal and professional development in today’s society
- and, consequently, a good achievement of digital and communicative competences are needed for all areas of employment, then their acquisition should start in compulsory education

The materials are based on the project methodology and intend to:
- improve communicative competence of the pupils developing the following communicative components: the four linguistic skills; discourse structure and sociolinguistic cultural appropriateness in context
- develop digital competence: provoking a significant use of digital competence in student teachers and pupils, avoiding the weak use of digital competence as copy and paste
- achieve subject content reflecting on the relation of the subject content with other subjects and with reality

Moreover, it is also intended that pupils develop/acquire the following attitudes: their autonomy as learners, responsibility for their own learning, etc., and also transferable skills such as ability to locate information with digital tools, searching, selecting and organizing information, analysis and argumentation, inference, prediction, critical thinking, making decisions, solving problems, etc. These skills are also basic to join the world of work. The materials will be presented in the Conference and also some activities designed by the Professional Assessment Centre in our University to show how University graduates are prepared for the world of work, and how these competences are developed in a transversal way trying to help post-graduates for their professional future.

Keywords:

Transversal competences, education, professional development.