Anton Grebenšek from Velenje

Proposer: Beekeeping Association of Slovenia

The career path of Anton Grebenšek is paved with persistence, continuous professional growth and close attention to the needs of adult learners, particularly those employed in technical professions and the unemployed. More recently, he has made an especially valuable contribution to updating the training of beekeepers - not just because he dedicated himself to a whole new field, but also because he carried out this invaluable work after he had retired, when he could have withdrawn from the daily grind to a private life; instead he studied the laws of nature and human cooperation with nature. Anton Grebenšek comes from a working family. He began as an apprentice electrician, passed his examination to become a qualified electrician, and was promoted to foreman and teacher of practical lessons and technology in mechanical and electrical engineering. He was always able to combine different fields (particularly education and work) to improve the quality of the programmes he designed or carried out. He enhanced the theory and practice of adult education with the concept of ergological didactics, an organisational-didactic model for practical lessons and training in work processes. He was involved in preparing educational guidance programmes and the system of national vocational qualifications (NVQs), and a connected model of the needs of production, work practices and mentorship. On the introduction of the NVQ system, he contributed the concept of alternative vocational paths and the draft catalogue of professional knowledge for the beekeeper profession. He was also involved in the Slovenian Institute for Adult Education's projects Training for the Unemployed and Qualifications in the Adult Education System. He undertook his duties at the Beekeeping Association of Slovenia just as thoroughly as he had once done when working in a well-known technical field. Naturally, he had to learn a great deal from scratch, mainly from the experts in the team that prepared the programme, and he still supplements his knowledge with modern ICT-supported learning materials. Anton Grebenšek's contribution lies primarily in the original model of guidance and certification of informally obtained prior knowledge for the beekeeper profession, the idea of the Anton Janša beekeeping school and the modular design of education, training and additional training programmes.