Intercultural education resources for Erasmus students and their teachers

This manual collects ten intercultural education teaching activities meant primarily for students in higher education who are involved in the Erasmus programme, although they can also be adapted for other mobility programmes. Overall, the manual and its activities intend to fill a gap in the preparation offered to mobile students from an intercultural perspective. A number of studies (Abdallah-Pretceille, 1999; Anquetil, 2006; Dervin, 2008) have indeed shown that sojourns in a foreign country are not sufficient conditions to foster interculturality (i.e. intercultural learning). Both study abroad and intercultural education literature state that immersion in a different environment does not in itself reduce stereotypical perceptions of otherness (Coleman, 1998; Shaules, 2007; Strong, 2011); in addition to experience, interculturality needs reflection and analysis (Alred, Byram & Fleming, 2003; Jackson, 2010; Vande Berg, 2009). The resources collected in the manual intend to address these issues, and can help mobile students benefit as much as possible from their international experiences from an intercultural point of view. The teaching activities contained in this manual are freely downloadable from the IEREST website (http://www.ierest-project.eu/), and are published under the Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike” licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).