Learning methods in TCM and Yangsheng – Associazione Professionale OTTO

The “Learning methods in TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) and Yangsheng: towards excellence in adult education (Nourishing knowledge)” project is based on a wide choice of scientific literature and the partners experience in the field.

We believe that Chinese Medicine’s traditional teaching and learning methods peculiarities provide clues to develop and fine tune methodological instruments aimed at the assessment of formal and informal learning in adult education.

Moreover , this work could enhance production of adequate methodologies intended to develop transversal competences and strong awareness in adult students.

The ability to preserve health and to make an appropriate and active utilization of health care services is actually representing one of the basic competences on which citizens of the EU ground their possibility of expressing other professional and social competences during their whole life.

Moreover, people that for several reasons are excluded from curricular studies, often choose to engage in non-academic professional training in TCM and CAMs (more than 180.000 practitioners in Europe according to CAMbrella study, 2012).

This non curricular approach is often chosen by adult learners in general, generating a strong need for conceptual frames and instruments which could eventually objectively assess their acquired competences.

The general purposes of this project are:

Identification of appropriate methodologies for the assessment of those competences in the health field, which are usually developed in informal settings (such as apprenticeship and mutual learning).
Identification of good practices aimed at supporting entrepreneurship’s transversal competences for non-medical health sector professionals.
Provide practical instruments intended to effectively enable teachers and other educators to convey transversal skills, suitable to develop European Health Literacy

Comparing teaching methodologies adopted in different EU in TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) and Yangsheng (techniques to improve QOL -Quality of Life) and
by analizing correspondences and differences among the various core curriculum and learning outputs, our main aim is to develop a method apt to:

a) develop an advanced methodology of teaching and of theoretical-practical learning in health literacy, taking into account heterogeneous language codes in a self-awareness framed bio-psyco-social endeavour, involving a large number of people with fewer educational opportunity and socio economic poor conditions . These last two factors are considered as health determinants.

b) Assess which teaching methods prove their efficacy in developing those transversal competences needed for Entrepreneurship in the field of non-medical health support.

c) Compare methods for assessing informal skills, acquired by the practitioners during their learning process. The foreseen outcome of the project is the construction of an adequate methodology by European standards, for acknowledging, assessing and certifying competences acquired by formal, non formal and informal learning, in the fields of non-medical health support and health literacy.