The Adult Education Institution Dante was founded in 1991 and it offers a variety of regional and international education workshops, courses, and programmes for foreign language learning, teacher training, transferable skills training, entrepreneurship and management training for both youth and adults as well as language and vocational courses for disadvantaged groups. We are also providing the non-formal courses for disadvantaged groups (NEET, unemployed youth, unemployed women…) so they can gain more more recognition on the labour market. We are providing different courses also for seniors to promote active ageing.
Our objectives are:
• To foster awareness, education and solidarity in order to achieve responsible communities and promote their development.
• To encourage and promote equal opportunities and integration of people through training, use of and access to information.
• To foster social cohesion among people and cultures within different societies, to foster a more equitable society
We have about 300 adult attendees (16+) of different learning courses per year and 15 employees.
Our Institution is well-established and our educational programmes are designed to respond to the needs of modern society, contributing to the sustainable development of adult education at the regional, national and European level. In 2011, the Institution was awarded by the Croatian Agency for Mobility and European Projects and the European Commission for raising the level of competence of learning foreign languages.
Around ten years ago we started to implement the drama and the theatre methods in language teaching. Theatre and Drama teaching is considered one of the most modern and productive way of teaching foreign languages since it focuses on encouraging learners to use the target language from the very beginning under the guidance of the teachers.
Speaking skills are developed from the first contact with the language. Regarding to this we organized training and workshops for teachers and educators and try to improve language teachers skills by participating in training related to drama methods.
The Institution closely cooperates with state institutions – the Ministry of Science and Education, the Agency for Vocational Education and Training and Adult Education, and the Croatian Agency for Mobility and European Projects.
In addition to national cooperation, Dante has considerable experience in international cooperation and partnerships, carrying out European projects since 2009. Dante has participated in the Lifelong Learning Programme, the Erasmus+ Programme (in KA1 projects and KA2 projects) and the European Social Fund (one in cooperation with the Educators’ Centre Association from Hungary and another with the Ministry of Tourism in Croatia). Dante has hosted and organised numerous international meetings, training events, and conferences related to education. Two of our conferences were partially funded by the Central European Initiative (CEI) action plan and focused on key issues related to education in Croatia. Dante also became an ordinary member of the European Association for the Education of Adults (EAEA) in 2017. Dante was the organiser of the 2018 ESREA conference of the Between Global and Local: Adult Learning and Communities (BGL- ALC) Research Network on 2030 education goals and adult learning.
At the moment, Dante is running 1 KA1, 20 KA2, and 2 ESF projects and 1 Europe for Citizens. The most important organisations we cooperate and the scope of the cooperation:
– at the local level: City of Rijeka, various Language Schools, Workers Adult Education Institution, with all education institutions;
– at the regional level: Primorje-Gorski Kotar County, Porin Innovation Centre, with all education institutions;
– at national level: Agency for Vocational Education and Training and Adult Education, Education and Teacher Training Agency; Ministry of Science and Education; Croatian
