• Introduction
The Social and Health Care College in Aarhus has existed in 14 years and is one of the largest of its kind in Denmark. There are more than 25 Social and Health Care Colleges in Denmark.
The college provides the students with a formal education within the social and health care sector and thus offers a very short and efficient way to the labour market for a diversity of young people, adults and immigrants.
Our college it situated in Aarhus, the second biggest city in Denmark. The city is known for offering all kinds of educations from public school to universities and also for its growing and fast developing international technological industries.

• The social and health educations in the society
In Scandinavia, and especially in Denmark, we have a long tradition for integrating the social dimension in health care. This means that the social and health services are not simply addressing the citizens’ problems as medical problems, but also as social problems.
Thus the object of the social and health care services are the citizen and the citizen’s social situation, not for example the physical symptom of the citizen.
This tradition defines the basic educational and pedagogical challenge of the social and health care educations: we must train the professional and personal competencies of the staff in such a way, that they are able to approach, understand and support the client as a person, and as a person in a social and cultural environment.
The demand for this basic understanding of the citizen and the citizen’s problems necessarily leads to a number of pedagogical challenges for our teachers and for our educational environment.
Isolated medical knowledge might be taught in a very traditional way. But the competencies to approach the client as a social human being can only be developed, if the students are very active and problem solving in the learning proces.
Furthermore our groups of students are just as complex as the groups of clients. Our students are from 16 to 60 years old and from very different social, ethnical and cultural backgrounds.
This diversity of student background also challenge our teachers to develop different and effecient pedagogical tools and approaches. .

• Training people with very little educational background
In fact Denmark is one of the few countries in the world that offers a formal education and a professional career to people of all ages with very little formal educational background.
Anyone who has completed basic school can be admitted to the social and health education or the basic pedagogical education. And the educations allow the students to continue an education on a higher level.
This means that the social and health educations offer the possibility of a formal education, of a profession and of a career to people, who otherwise might have been excluded from such educational pathways.
Furthermore the social and health educations are organised in two steps. Each step formally qualifies the student to work in social and health care institutions, but on different levels and with different responsibilities.
Completing the second step allows the student to access further education within the social, health or pedagogical fields.
The diversity of the teaching staff equals that of the students.
The almost 100 teachers present all kind of educational backgrounds and professional profiles: academics, trained nurses, therapists and social workers, just to mention a few of the many different profiles.
This professional diversity reflects the complexity of the key issues in the educations and it contributes very much to the dynamic learning community.

• Visions of diversity
The basic and most important vision of the Social and Health Care College in Aarhus is to offer to the diversity of young and adult students an educational environment, in which they can develop the combination of professional skills and personal competencies, they need to meet the complex challenges of their future jobs.
The majority of our extremely diverse groups of students are practically oriented and are not motivated for long theoretical courses – but nevertheless they will be confronted with the very complex challenges of the social and health care sector in Denmark after a rather short education.
Thus the college focuses on pedagogical methods that support the students’ motivation to learn, to support and understand the social and pedagogical client groups and to develop an awareness of the basic values in social and pedagogical work.
Therefore the college wishes to maintain a diversity of pedagogical approaches and methods, that allow different kinds of people and learners to develop professional qualifications and personal competencies, based on the joy of learning and the will to learn.
The teaching and counselling staff of the college must be able to contribute to this kind of environment and must be able to further develop the pedagogical methods.
The college therefore prefere teachers who have the resources and the motivation to further develop the pedagogical approaches to the very diverse and often fast changing student groups.
It is also an important vision of the college to support the diversity environments by cooperating with many different institutions, with labour market organisations and with partners and colleagues throughout Europe. The vision of diversity demands openness towards other ideas and practices and it also demands a continued developmental effort: new answers must be found to new challenges.
Finally the college very much wishes to support the students’ and teachers’ development of modern personal competencies. We do that by involving students and teachers actively in all educational processes and by integrating information and communication technology in all kind of working processes and on all levels of the educations.
Thus the development of personal competencies to handle the complexity of the knowledge society is an important vision for our educational environment.

• Education and jobs for a diversity of people
The three basic educations qualifie the students to work in a diversity of jobs within the public service care sector: hospitals, centers for elderly and physically and mentally disabled persons, kindergartens and after school institutions. Many of the students will be working in local service centers, providing help and support directly to the clients in their own homes.
The social and health care helper is qualified to provide elementary personal services, rehabilitation and cleaning in the homes of the citizens and this short education also qualifies for attending the social and health care assistent education.
The social and health care assistent has higher competencies: to provide basic nursing and to medicate. This education qualifies you to attend the further educational level of nurse training and physiotherapist training.
The basic pedagogical education qualifies you to work as a pedagogical helper in nurseries, kindergartens and several other institutions for children, handicapped persons and adults.
The basic pedagogigal education also allow you to attend the further educational level of pedagogical training.
All these educations include long periods of practical training in different kinds of institutions.
This stepstone model makes it possible for people with very little educational background to get a professional training and thus give them access to the labour market. But it also opens up for more education on higher levels.
Therefore this stepstone model is relevant to a diversity of young people, adults of all ages and immigrants: it gives you direct access to the labour market and a social identity after a short period of education, but it also allows you to access more education and to build a career within the social and health care sector.

• Special introductory courses
The college offers two long introductory courses – one for young people and one for immigrants.
The first one is a special social and health care preparatory course, that corresponds to the 10th year of basic compulsory school. This course is primarily for 15 and 16 years old young people, who are interested in working in the social and health care sector, but need time to reflect on their further educational steps and need to get practical insight into the social and health care field. Most of the students attend the social and health care helper education or the basic pedagogical education after this introductory course.
The second special course is for immigrants, who need to prepare themselves for one of the basic educations. Therefore this course is primarily about language training and practical knowledge about the Danish society and culture.
This course also provides a lot of personal counselling and the course tries to focus on the resources of the immigrants and to support their selfconfidens.
Many of the immigrants attend one of the basic educations after this course.

• A diversity of pedagogical approaches
The combination of seeing the client as a social individual and the diversity the students in the social and health care educations forces the teachers and the educational environment to develop a variety of pedagogical approaches and tools. The teachers have to work with many different kind of students, young, middleaged, immigrants etc. etc. and establish learning processes, in which the students in different ways can aquire those skills and competencies needed to meet the challenges of the complex social lives of the client groups.
Thus the educational environment of the Social and Health Care College consists in a diversity of pedagogical approaches.
Nevertheless they are all well rooted in the basic Scandinavian learning principle: the students must be very active in the learning proces and must learn to take responsibility for their own learning.
And they must be able to express themselves in different communicative contexts.
The passive taking in of formal knowledge will not qualify the students to deal with the complex future social tasks.
Therefore the students are motivated to learn to construct and handle knowledge and to implement this knowledge in the complex reality of social life. In short, the professional skills must be combined with personal competencies to learn and to act in complex social contexts.

• A diversity of technological resources
The diversities of the groups of students and the clients’ social lives call not only for flexible and variable pedagogical practices, but also for experiments with the many different learning tools, provided by the new technology and the new media.
The college is not aiming at using the new technology to standardize the learning processes, but to enhance the mosaic of tools for communication, cooperating, competence development and self expression.
Thus we try to integrate IT and audi-visual media in different ways in the learning processes and to improve the competencies of the edacational staff and the students to use the technology in their everyday learning activities.
The college experiments with a diversity of technology supported learning environments: e-learning, blended learning and technology supported in-college learning.
The college is one of the few educational institutions in Denmark who has supported the technologichal strategies by establishing an in house professional media team, called sosuMedia.
The mission of this media team is to develop new internet based and visual learning material in close cooperation with the teachers.
SosuMedia produces a variety of digital content solutions in local, national and European projects. The team has specialized in the production and delivery of netbased and streamed high quality video.

• A diversity of development projects
The college is constantly giving high priority to different kind of development projects, national as well as international.
The projects aim at improving the guideance and counselling of students to prevent them from dropping out or to help them making the best educational choices. They aim at supporting the language and cultural skills of the immigrant students. They aim at supporting the individual student through educational planning and ongoing learning reflection. They aim at provided more visual and motivating material for the courses. They aim at designing learning processes integrated in the working life of the social, health and pedagogical staff. They aim at motivating men to work with social and pedagogical care taking.
The development activities produces a dynamic learning environment, asking questions, meeting challenges and adding value to the learning community.
The development work is supported by a strong development department, through which the different development activities are coordinated and through which several synergie effects are produced.

• A diversity of international involvment
The Social and Health Care College has always been very active on the international scene. Study visits, international cooperation and mobility activities has been a natural part of the everyday learning community.
But since the start of the new millenium the international activities has been given still more priority.
Due to the ethnical diversity of the students and to the European focus on social and health care issues it is only natural, that the college is becomming still more involved in transnational cooperation.
The college is involved in all kinds of international activities, but two areas can be identified as the most important: European counselling and European project cooperation.
The college acts as counsellor for several social and health care development projects in the former Eastern European countries and in Russia.
This counselling covers issues of developing social services systems as well as developing social and health care ducations.
The European project cooperation takes place within the large EU educational programmes, Grundtvig and Leonardo, and within the European Social Fund.
The college is the promoter and coordinator of several European cooperation projects.
The college has a very large European network of partners and is very active in the establisment and maintainance of a strong strategical network, based on the principles and mission of the EU Lifelong Learning strategy.

• For further information, please contact:

Social and Health Care educations in general
The development department of the college
The formal educations
International counselling
Niels Christian Vestergaard
nv@sosu.aaa.dk

Guidance and counselling
European cooperation projects
Jan Wadsholt
sskajw@sosuaarhus.dk

IT, media and technology
sosuMedia
European cooperation projects
Strategical European networks
Jan Gejel
jan.gejel@skolekom.dk

• I N F O

Financial turnover pr. year: 10 million euro.

Educational staff: 80 full time, 20 part time

Amount of students: several hundred pr. year

Legal status: public institution, managed by the County of Aarhus

Teacher profile: teachers with 20 different professional backgrounds

Student profile: from 16 to 60 years old, often very little educational background, most of them women, 20% of the students are immigrants and respresent almost 50 different countries

Main activities: social and health helper and assistent education, basic pedagogical education, special courses for young people and immigrants, a lot of vocational training of social and health and pedagogical staff

International activities: student and teacher mobility, promotors of different EU projects, partners in many EU projects, counselling on social and health education in many former Eastern European countries and Russia, very large international network, promoters of the City Learning Net working strategically with the EU Lifelong Learning programme from 2007-13