Our podcast journey
Second Summer School: Interview with teacher
Our podcast journey through Europe continues in Italy, where Francesco Bruno APRO Formazione project manager talks about BELONGtoEU, the lessons of “Europeans of Tomorrow” and the energy of the Athens Summer School.
Francesco Bruno works at APRO Formazione, a vocational training school in Piedmont with campuses in Alba and Canelli and about 500 students across the provinces of Cuneo and Asti. A graduate in International Sciences, he has spent three years working on European projects, Erasmus+ and Jean Monnet, for the school. At the Summer School in Athens he shared the experience behind BELONGtoEU, and in the podcast he goes into more depth.
BELONGtoEU is a European network of vocational schools led by APRO Formazione with the scientific support of the University of Eastern Piedmont. Its partnership deliberately spans five countries, Italy, North Macedonia (outside the EU), Estonia, Spain (Basque Country) and Ireland, to bring together different geographical and political contexts. Its main goal is to train VET teachers directly, so that they can confidently integrate European citizenship and values into their own lessons.
The project grew out of a three-year pilot that introduced 40 hours of European topics directly into existing cross-curricular subjects, such as Italian, English, economics, law and science, without extra afternoon or extracurricular hours. Through co-teaching, an expert in European affairs worked alongside the regular teacher: for example explaining the eurozone and the single market in economics lessons, or setting up letter exchanges in English with Finnish classes.
At the end of the three years, teachers expressed a clear need: targeted training to become autonomous in teaching about the EU, even without an external expert in the room.
Listen now to the full episode to discover more!
At the annual EfVET conference in Brussels, Francesco accompanied two APRO students. One very active young man told him that three years earlier he would never have imagined coming to Brussels to tell his story, but that he also thought of all his classmates who would never have the chance.
That moment captures the core mission of European projects in VET. Since not every student can do a mobility abroad, schools need to bring the mountain to Muhammad: bring Europe and its opportunities into the everyday classroom.
Francesco spoke warmly of the collaborative atmosphere and energy of the teachers in Athens, calling the Summer School a perfect example of how open sharing of good practices and difficulties makes European cooperation effective.
And Europe in one word? “Sharing”: of experiences, of a past, of goals and of perspectives for the future.