AARHUS – FISU is advocating and promoting the implementation of the Dual Career programmes within higher educational institutions. For example, FISU was instrumental in including this concept and more specifically the term into the Kazan Action Plan that was adopted by UNESCO at the occasion of MINEPS VI last July.
Thanks to its cooperation with EAS, FISU started develop a questionnaire and survey to collect data amongst the FISU member federations and their core partners. This started during the 29th Summer Universiade in Taipei last August when Mojca Doupona Topic, FISU Education Committee working group member on Dual Career and Laura Capranica, President of EAS participated at the roundtable on Dual Career that took place during the Opening Ceremony of the Taipei 2017 FISU Conference together with the NCAA president, Mark Emmert and the Chair of the FISU Education Committee, Verena Burk. Laura Capranica also con
ducted a number of interviews with FISU leaders to better understand how this programme is organised in different countries and how to collect a higher level of information on the existing programmes. Both of them ran a leadership seminar in the Universiade Village for the team officials.
The EAS Conference 2017 was hosted from 12 to 14 September in the Danish city of Aarhus, currently the European Capital of Culture 2017. Twenty two countries were represented during this three-day Conference. The key concept of the event was ‘Talent Development’.
The conference combined formal speeches, academic presentations and athlete’s experience. The representatives of the institutions organising this Conference who delivered a speech were, the Danish minister for culture, Mette Bock, the EAS President, Laura Capranica, the President of the European Network of Sport Education, Paolo Parisi, and finally the European Commission participated with a speech from the representative of the Sport Unit, Agata Dziarnowska.
On the academic part, the most prominent speaker was the Canadian teacher from Queens University, Jean Côté presenting his study of modelisation for reaching elite sport, starting from the three elements which are; quality social dynamics, personal engagement in activities and appropriate settings to influence personal assets like competence, confidence, connection, character for outcomes focusing on performance, participation and personal development. The athlete’s voice was raised by Sara Slott, silver medallist for Denmark at the 2016 Olympics in Rio. She explained that it was extremely important for her to have been a student in order to better balance her life not having to practice only sport, focusing on the importance of having other personal goals.
Mojca Doupona Topic, FISU Education Committee working group member on Dual Career, in her capacity of Professor at the University of Ljubljana presented a European project for providing lectures on entrepreneurship to student-athletes who are finishing their sport career and are about to integrate professional life.
The presentations and debates focused on how to keep the talented persons combining sport and studies by asking “do we lose some talents?”, the importance of leadership skills and interaction at the right level and in an appropriate manner between the different stakeholders (athletes, coaches, professors,..), why such differences from one country to another in the number of elite athletes with higher education degrees and why some fields of study are over represented.
On the last day a post Conference took place run by EAS entitled: “How to develop – a Dual Career mindset in Youth Sport”.
For more information: http://conferences.au.dk/ense-sportsummit2017/