Earth goes Europe

Article de conférenceEarth material has numerous advantages when it comes to reducing environmental impacts in the building sector, but its use remains limited as few professionnals are trained : very few formal trainings exist at european level. European earth-building training projects were undertaken during the last years to open the way for the official recognition of earth-building's skills and knowledge. This is an essential part of the effort to widespread the use of earth in the building sector. This paper intends to stress the interests of assessment to get earth construction recognized and introduced in current construction trainings at all levels, and to recognize learning outcomes to deliver certificates. Firstly, the concepts of assessment criteria and units of learning outcomes, part of the ECVET framework (European Credit system for Vocational and Educational Training) will be described through example of previous experiences in european earth-building training. In a second part, the development of this experience acquired with projects dealing with clay plasters will be presented : the PIRATE (Provide Instructions and Recommendations for the Assessment and Training in Earth-building) project aims to build with 18 european partners the foundations of european earth masonry and supervision trainings by proposing assessment criteria and defining units of learning outcomes able to integrate existing curricula. Finally, the current progress of this project will open to questions about the opportunities and issues encountered so fa