What is Youthpass?
There’s no doubt that a DiscoverEU travel is full of great opportunities for learning, about oneself, about the cities visited, about travelling itself and more!
Youthpass is a process that helps participants of Erasmus+ Youth become aware of their learning journey when taking part in a European project, and a a certificate that recognises participants’ learning achievements by including their self-assessment in the official certificate. This applies to DiscoverEU travels managed by organisations, too.
Why Youthpass?
Reflection is an essential part of learning, especially of learning by doing. While reflecting on what they have experienced, travellers will become more aware of their own competences and better at explaining them to others. And documenting such reflection, in the language of learning and competences is very useful, both for personal documentation but also when talking about such an experience as a learning experience to other. And Youthpass is a great tool that enables it.
Imagine this: in a few years’ time, one of the travellers may be in a job interview and refer to their DiscoverEU experience not only as a travel where they had a great time (it surely was!) but also an experience where they learnt concrete skills.
Who receives Youthpass? Who should issue it?
All the travellers in DiscoverEU managed and supported by organisations are entitled to a Youthpass certificate. The organisers are responsible for informing the travellers of this possibility. They can also provide methods and tools to support travellers reflection on learning.
The organisers should create an account at youthpass.eu and insert the general information about the travel and the traveller. They can then invite the traveller to edit their data for their certificate and write up their self-assessment. At the end of the travel the organisers generate and sign the certificate and make it available to the traveller as a pdf file.
Note: In case for any reason, the invitation to the Youthpass platform is not seen necessary by the organiser, then they can find other ways to collect the written self-assessment of the traveller and the organiser can insert this information to the platform themselves. Inviting the traveller to the platform is not necessary, what is essential is to find suitable methods to help them write their self-assessment.
The self-assessment in Youthpass is descriptive. In DiscoverEU Youthpass certificates, the European Framework for Key Competences for Lifelong Learning is used for self-assessment. However, to propose a more fitting framework to the travel experience, only some of the competence areas are included in the certificates and the description of the competence areas are adapted as follows:
- Personal, social, and learning competence
- Citizenship competence
- Sense of initiative and project management
- Foreign languages
- Cultural awareness and expression
- Digital and social media competence
- Financial competence
It is also possible to make use of the 'Other competences' field for self-assessment in addition to or instead of the previously mentioned competence areas.