The first teacher training seminar within the international project “Early Childhood Education – Building Sustainable Motivation and Value Paradigm for Life” (MOV-UP) took place in Sofia on 17 and 18 February 2017. The project is initiated by the Sofia Municipality District “Nadezda” and the Intercultural Cooperation Foundation and is supported by the European Commission in the frames of the Erasmus+ Program. The seminar featured presentations and workshops with speakers from Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, Turkey and Bulgaria.
The speakers from University of Malta Prof. Valerie Sollars e introduced Quality education in early years and Prof. Carmel Cefai acquainted the teachers with the topic of Resilience in the early years of education, promoting activities form the RESCUR handbook.
Maria Ampartzaki and Michail Kalogiannakis from the University of Crete introduced their perspective on Art as inquiry-based learning, fostering mutual understanding and respect among people with different ethnic or religious backgrounds, beliefs or convictions. They engaged the audience with craftwork, exploring the tastes and the culture of the others, promoting intercultural dialogue.
Cinzia Laurelli, Isabella Belcari and Alessia Amendolia from the Fondazione Nazionale Carlo Collodi introduced their artistic educational work, based in the home of the globally famous children’s book character Pinocchio.
Workshop by Ramazan Sezer and Duygu Doğan from Doğa Scools presented the “Feeling by Experiments” approach to introducing science topics to youngest pupils.
Renata Jankeviciene and Erika Jankeviciute from the Regional educational center of Panevėžio in Lithuania presented the work with the Emotional hand puppets.
The opening and closing sessions belonged to Iglika Angelova and Reni Dimova, representatives of the hosting organisations, introducing the audience and the guest speakers with details on the MOV-UP project and the aims of the seminar.
The MOV-UP project aims to create a training course for in-service teacher from pre-school and early school education aimed towards development of the emotional competence, values, motivation and pupils’ attitude. Improving the acquisition of social and civic competences and fostering knowledge, understanding and ownership of democratic values and fundamental rights through the curriculum of the early education are also part of the project’s objectives.