International Projects

Each year a number of students from St. John’s Central College are given the opportunity to participate in work placement in other European Union countries. The European Union’s Leonardo da Vinci program through the Irish national agency, Leargas, funds this scheme. Our partners in this activity include the Handwerkskammer in Koblenz Germany, Arctic Vocational Foundation in Sweden, AOC Terra in the Netherlands and Kreisberufskolleg in Brakel Germany. Students from each of our partner colleges also come to Cork on work placement with St. John’s Central College hosting their stay.

We are also actively involved in projects funded under the Socrates program. These include Comenius language projects and Grundtvig projects. Previous Comenius projects have seen students working to create a dictionary of computer terms and also looking at ways of presenting tourist information and the production of tourism packs. In each case the final project was presented both in German and in English. These projects were made available on CD-ROM and can be viewed on our European projects website. These projects also gave students the opportunity to visit many places of interest such as, Berlin, Cologne, Paderborn, Kassel, and Hoxter.

Our Grundtvig project activities allow us to take a wider European perspective when looking at the needs of adult students. Our partners in this activity come from colleges in Spain, Finland, Italy, Turkey, Poland and Slovakia. The development of International projects is an ongoing process and new projects are being planned with colleges in Shanghai, Hungary and Poland. Enthusiastic student involvement is essential to the success of these projects.