Cariñena - Spain

Your Life - Your Portfolio

Personal memories and life experience used as teaching aids for basic skills training of seniors

The Portfolio approach – in a nutshell – means that learners create a collection of texts and artwork with biographical information, memories, reports on topics interesting for them, etc. The municipal adult education centre Ricardo Sola Almau in Cariñena, a small town 50 kilometres from Zaragoza, used the MobileBE project for an experimental roll-out of this method into the huge rural area it covers, with many villages who have their own “classrooms” (local venues dedicated to education). Participants were most of all elderly people who often had had only a few years of school, and now, in their retirement years, are keen on learning new skills, but also on reflecting on their achievements during a life dedicated to family and hard work. The Portfolio approach turned out to be a great success: CPEPA Cariñena implemented the method in 12 places with groups of 10 persons on average.

We had groups in most 12 locations (11 villages, 1 town), with about 10 participants per group.

 See the separate online presentation of this pilot.

A full report on this experimental course is published in our book "New Ideas to Promote Literacy".