REVEAL

Experience, Achievements and Learning

Recognition of Experience Validation of Experience, Achievements and Learning

Context

It is significant that currently only 4.3% of adults with low formal education in the EU participate in lifelong learning. The need to create, promote and support a learning society is currently being hampered by problems such as how to bridge the gap between informal, non-formal and formal learning, how to support and activate hard to reach and underserved learner groups and how to apply technology to social innovations. As the recent response paper from the Lifelong Learning Platform to the EU’s Future of Learning (2018) states: “we urge Member States to broaden[their] scope to the non-formal and informal learning as providers in this area, particularly civil society organisations, are in a strategic position for reaching out to the most vulnerable and marginalised groups in society.”

Objectives

Everyone belongs to Local Recognition Networks (LRNs) of some sort, which may be a professional, civic or social network, informal or formal (club, association, business, trade union, etc.). Whether for leisure or work pursuits, these LRNs are places where individuals develop a wide range of skills, knowledge, attitudes and values that could be activated beyond those places. But to do so, they would need to be recognised beyond the limits of LRNs.

The objectives of REVEAL (Recognition of Experience Validation of Experience, Achievements and Learning) is twofold:

providing support to existing informal and formal networks to become active Learning Recognition Networks, i.e. recognising the learning that takes place within in a way that makes it visible beyond
exploring the potential of loosely coupling (informal) ‘recognition’ and (formal) ‘validation’ as a means to remove current barriers to recognition

REVEAL builds on existing and emerging practices with the support of technologies, Open Badges, open data and their application to social innovation to remove barriers to recognition, encouraging new learning and career pathways based on real life experience with a focus on adults with low levels of formal education in, or expected to be, in precarious job situations, e.g. early school leavers, long term unemployed, women back to work, migrants.