The Debating Society is a member of the Erasmus+ Voice of Vocation KA2 partnership

Voice of Vocation addresses the needs of VET teachers, students, and NGOs in debate education looking to work with VET schools in line with needs identified by a string of EU policy recommendations and reports by the Commission, Parliament, and Council recognizing VET students' need for strong foundations for resilience, lifelong learning, lifelong employability, social inclusion, active citizenship and personal development. Partners all share an interest in introducing debate methods to VET but are limited in training, teacher education and teaching materials tailored for the purpose and tested by teachers and students in VET.

To concisely introduce more debate methods in VET education, the KA2 „Voice of Vocation“ project (VoV) aims to increase VET teachers’ capacity to support students in the development of transferable soft skills and becoming active and informed citizens through the use of interactive, debate-based teaching methods and tools.

Specific objectives are:

• Support VET teachers in acquiring the knowledge they need to increase vocational students’ up-skilling capacity, lifelong learning skills and resilience through the development of self-confidence, critical thinking, presentation, and argumentation skills;
• Increase partners’ capacity to extend their programmes into vocational schools and facilitate the merging of formal methods in VET with positive non-formal debate-based methods;
• Empower VET students to become active and informed European citizens with knowledge about their rights and European values

The partner consortium of this project includes 4 youth/debate associations (CDS, SNDI, DSG and OK), 4 VET schools (ŠCP, BSBB, IISS PS, ETŠ) from Croatia, Italy, Serbia and Germany and an umbrella debate organisation (IDEA) from the Netherlands. All the debate organisations have previous experience in adjusting debate methodology into the formal education system. Vocational schools will be key contributors in the development, testing and gaining feedback on the implementation toolkit. IDEA's experience in providing educational solutions and tools will be of key importance in designing e-learning courses as one of the results of this project. Our project includes VET schools and NGOs that work in different circumstances. We take this mix of experiences into account to produce tangible project results that can be used beyond our project.  CDS - Croatian Debate Society is a leading partner organisation.