eTwinning has completely changed the way of teaching for eTwinning Ambassador Mari Jokela, who works as a teacher of tourism at Lapland Education Centre REDU, Finland.

‘I began to use eTwinning as support for teaching about ten years ago. In a contact seminar in Vienna, I met an Austrian teacher who asked our students to join a business correspondence project. Our students got interested in the idea as they would be communicating with customers and tour operators from different countries when working in tourism companies in the future. Now, real people were available for practising that.’

That’s how her journey in international projects for VET students started. In the beginning, even she herself was nervous about how the cooperation would work.

‘The devices do not always work, or it may be difficult to connect even though everything has been checked the night before. In such situations, it may be the student guiding the teacher. Over the years, teaching has changed and started to resemble workshops.’

Despite the initial difficulties, what Jokela found the most valuable were the contacts gained through eTwinning. She still receives cooperation requests on a weekly basis.

‘For example, if the topic the students are studying is European tourism geography, it does make teaching and learning quite different if you include partners from across Europe to talk about their home countries.’

Jokela herself experienced the potential of internationalisation as an opportunity to understanding foreign customers while she was a travel guide in South Portugal:

‘A personal experience of what it feels like when a Finnish person abroad cannot get dinner until after eight in the evening helps to understand the expectations of international customers when they come to our home region.’

In this perspective, eTwinning projects offer students and teachers the opportunity of empathising with international customers and cultures as an important working skill which is not just for tourism students, but for the entire educational institution.

Feedback from students has been extremely positive, as they found internationalisation an important part of their vocational studies. ‘It is also nice to see that especially young people who would not go abroad on their own initiative come back with completely new ideas from an internationalisation period.’

If you are curious about Mari Jokela’s eTwinning experience, read more about her testimony.