LEARNING AND TEACHING TO COMBAT FOREST FIRES: CREATING EUROPEAN STANDARDS IN FIREFIGHTING CROSS-NATIONALLY

WILDFIRE wants to achieve a stronger alignment of policies and VET instructions for squads, commanders, and instructors in forest firefighting in Europe. For this reason, WILDFIRE goals coincide w...

WILDFIRE wants to achieve a stronger alignment of policies and VET instructions for squads, commanders, and instructors in forest firefighting in Europe. For this reason, WILDFIRE goals coincide with the European DigCompOrg in relation to its blended learning elements, EQF and learning descriptors. WILDFIRE fills a knowledge gap for firefighters, reduce numbers of victims, as wildland firefighting goes beyond local and/or regional conditions, and its impact will increase with climate change.

With its multi-level approach, WILFIRE will involve different firefighters in its project activities. The successful implementation of WILDFIRE is based on a coherent and comprehensive VET scheme with a competency matrix and a policy recommendation. The sequence of work is: 1. policy recommendation to have a framework and public interest to develop the squad VET scheme (2), then VET scheme for commanders and then for instructors. This will lead to the first wildland firefighting handbook.

WILDFIRE results will be follow priorities of EQF, learning descriptors, and with DigCompOrg for the BLE. It will try to overcome intergovernmental barriers in the fire service through this VET cooperation. To this end, WILDFIRE partners will engage with policy makers and educators at EU, national and regional levels to maximize dissemination of its results. It is expected that a goal-oriented network will be established across Europe, which will continue after the end of the project as an OER.