Adult Education Institution Dante

Adult Education Institution Dante deals with performing foreign language learning programs. The Institution started working in 1991 as the company Dante d.o.o., and in 2009 it changed its internal structure by becoming a public institution which implements verified foreign language learning programs approved by the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports. A total of 25 years of continuous work made the school recognizable and acknowledged not just in the city of Rijeka, but also in the wider local and regional community. Since we started participating in LL programs, we have established cooperation with almost every country in the EU. At the moment we are teaching four languages in the Institution: English, German, Italian and Croatian for foreigners, and there are about 300 adult attendees. The Institution currently employs 10 employees, some of whom are on full-time basis and some on part-time basis. Since 2010 we have actively participated in LL programs, especially Grundtvig subprogramme, while in the period from 2010 to 2015 we signed more than 30 contracts with AMPEU concerning most of the activities that the Grundtvig subprogramme offered and thus we realized more than 145 mobilities for the purposes of education, professional training and cooperation with other European institutions. Also, our Institution has been the host for five Grundtvig assistants. We have realized four Grundtvig education partnerships, one of which was coordinated by our Institution. In 2012 we started with a project in which we actively included persons older than 50 with the purpose of promoting life-long learning, and thus we stimulated them to participate in educational programs in our Institution. The Institution was the organizer of professional training "Learning and Teaching: Interaction Through Senses" which was published in the Grundtvig training database. As the first applicant from Croatia, we performed professional trainings in three cycles, which were highly graded by attendees from England, Turkey, Spain, Estonia, Croatia, Germany, Belgium and Norway. In 2011, the Institution received the award by AMPEU and the European Commission for raising the level of competence of learning foreign languages. Today we have 4 active projects in Erasmus+ programmes, both in KA1 and KA2. On the basis of our long-term work, number of attendees, participation in EU projects and evaluations by our associates and attendees, we consider ourselves as excellent foreign language teachers. We believe that the mentioned activities are well-established and by observing the current needs of the society, as well as the Institution’s development strategy, we concluded that we would like to expand our educational offer with various programs and trainings, such as training social and communicational skills, entrepreneurship, management, sustainable development and teacher professional development. Our employees are included in the projects and are expected to develop professionally and gain knowledge, skills and views important for the development and improvement of competences we already mentioned.They are expected to develop further into trainers for certain programmes. We believe that our success in past curricular and extra-curricular work, active participation in European projects and general contribution to improvement of the quality of educational offer and the life in the local community is relevant for the application.