VET Student Contest

Main cause of the contest

This contest is about inclusiveness and non-discrimination within Vocational Education and Training institutes due to sexual orientation, gender identity and sexual characteristics. In other words, our theme is how we can make VET institutes an open and comfortable area for LGBTIQ (fellow) students. In this sense, your submissions may not focus exclusively on sexual orientation or gender identity but they should be linked somehow with this in order to be awarded. Intersectional submissions (in which race or other discrimination grounds are combined with issues around gender and sexual inclusion), are very welcome.

Image

Participant's Profile

The participants should be currently enrolled into a Vocational Education and Training programme in one of the partner countries, namely Greece, Cyprus, Poland and Croatia. All students, regardless of their sexual orientation and gender identity, are encouraged to participate in the contest, provided that they respect other contestants’ freedom of expression.

1. The submission can be any form of artwork, be it an image, a video clip, a painting or a text. It can also be a performance or dance, but the submission then needs to be recorded and sent on a digital model.

2. For any images or videos of people, formal permission for publication is necessary. The project provides Model Permission Form for this.

3. The submission does not necessarily have to be originally created for this contest, but it needs to be linked to the contest’s main cause. In any case, the artworks that will be evaluated should be attributed to the creators or safeguard the intellectual property rights of third parties.

4. The content should be intended to be positive and should never further prejudice or discrimination.

5. All artworks will be numbered in an order of date and submission. They may be either anonymous or attributed under the contestant's full name; they should be accompanied with a valid email and phone number, a signed submission declaration which indicates agreement with the conditions and the GDPR, and if needed, duly signed Model Permission Form.

6. All contestants will receive a confirmation e-mail upon the submission of their artworks.

All artworks should be submitted, along with the duly signed Submission Form, by email to uniqueproject.eu@gmail.com. The submissions should be entered between 1 May 2022 and 31 May 2022 in order to be valid for evaluation.

The submissions will be judged by an independent jury per country, composed of 3-5 members. This jury will be appointed by the UNIQUE partners in each partner country and will rate the submitted pieces of art based on the conveyed messages, the originality of ideas and the overall visibility of inclusiveness and respect for diversity.

National partners will ensure that the members of the jury will be impartial and will not have a teaching/training relationship with the contestants.

The winners will be announced at the end of June 2022 and will be awarded in a special ceremony.

In June, each jury at the national level will meet to identify the eligible submissions and conclude the final list. The eligible pieces of art will be scored on a scale from 1 to 10 (10 being the highest score) and the first 3 will be awarded an exclusive post on the project’s and the partner’s website and social media.

In addition, the pieces of art may also be published in the Erasmus+ Results Platform (under explicit approval of the contestant) and an award certificate will be sent to the successful candidates.

The contestants who will not win will be granted a letter which will praise and thank them for their effort.

The submissions will be treated with confidentiality and will be published only after the participants’ explicit approval. If the contestants wish and indicate this in the respective form, they could enter the contest anonymously. However, for contact purposes, at least phone numbers and emails need to be provided.

Contestants’ Personal Data will be handled in line with the 2016/679 EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and will be used only for the purposes of this action. In addition, the UNIQUE partner in charge of the national contest restricts access to employees who reasonably need to be aware of the above for the performance of this activity.

Contestants have the right to withdraw their consent or ask for the deletion of their data at any time. However, the withdrawal of consent shall not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before the request for withdrawal. To withdraw your submissions or delete your data, you can send an email to uniqueproject.eu@gmail.com, indicating “Withdrawal of consent/erasure of data from UNIQUE VET Student Contest” in the title of your email.

Information about the project

The UNIQUE project aims to reverse the perceptions and attitudes toward LGBTIQ learners in VET Sector by introducing innovative, inclusive and gender-sensitive training materials for VET Teachers/Trainers and educating them in safeguarding and promoting a non-discriminatory classroom.

In the course of the project, the partnership will design a modern Training Curriculum for VET Teachers/Trainers after conducting a detailed mapping of the discriminatory norms and patterns met in VET Education and will appoint Ambassadors to diffuse the new training strategy through peer learning activities within their VET Providers at European level so as to maximise the impact. The new Curriculum will be piloted in the participating countries to test its efficacy and relevance to the actual needs.