More than 25 years after the launch of the Erasmus Programme, fostering youth mobility and developing the intercultural competencies of the younger generation remain crucial issues within Europe. The IEREST project meets these needs by developing, testing and disseminating an Intercultural Path (namely, a set of teaching modules) to be provided to Erasmus students before, during, and after their experience abroad, in order to encourage learning mobility, support students and enable them to benefit as much as possible from their international experiences in terms of personal growth and intercultural competencies. Besides developing the intercultural education resources for the teaching modules, the project aims to make such teaching activities freely available on the Internet under the ‘Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike’ Creative Commons Licence, and to foster the institutionalization of the Intercultural Paths within HEIs, in order to make the practice of providing Erasmus students with intercultural services the rule rather than the exception. These two objectives are the best guarantee of IEREST’s sustainability. The project has three main target users: potential, future, present and past Erasmus students, teachers in higher education, and HEIs’ stakeholders and policy makers. IEREST is carried out by seven partners (University of Bologna; Durham University; University of Savoy, Chambéry; University of Helsinki; University of Primorska, Koper; University of Leuven; the Open University), which have complementary expertise, ranging from study abroad, Erasmus mobility and internationalisation, to intercultural education and communication, intercultural language education, and open education. The project has also three associate partners, which represent the main IEREST target users: students (AEGEE-Europe), teachers (AEDE-Hungary) and international affairs officers and stakeholders (T.M.Kempen). Initially, the project mainly focused on obtaining a multi-faceted overview of the needs of the target users with respect to intercultural education for studying abroad. This overview was conducted by means of cycles of literature review, a student questionnaire (3,152 responses) and three focus groups, each with representatives of a different target group. The overall study provided crucial input for the design of the teaching activities. At present, four pre-departure teaching activities for Module 1 have been completed, and are designed to promote the ideas that people are different but also similar across and within countries, and have multiple identities. These are being tested in five of the IEREST partner institutions. They will then be fine-tuned and published online. The same overall implementation methodology will be used for the modules to be taught when students are abroad and upon their return (the piloting will take place respectively in autumn 2014 and spring 2015). The project website and newsletter are the main sources of information about the project objectives and outcomes. The newsletter subscription form is available through the website: http://ierest-project.eu/.

IEREST public progress report

BEAVEN, ANA MARIA GABRIELA;BORGHETTI, CLAUDIA
2014

Abstract

More than 25 years after the launch of the Erasmus Programme, fostering youth mobility and developing the intercultural competencies of the younger generation remain crucial issues within Europe. The IEREST project meets these needs by developing, testing and disseminating an Intercultural Path (namely, a set of teaching modules) to be provided to Erasmus students before, during, and after their experience abroad, in order to encourage learning mobility, support students and enable them to benefit as much as possible from their international experiences in terms of personal growth and intercultural competencies. Besides developing the intercultural education resources for the teaching modules, the project aims to make such teaching activities freely available on the Internet under the ‘Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike’ Creative Commons Licence, and to foster the institutionalization of the Intercultural Paths within HEIs, in order to make the practice of providing Erasmus students with intercultural services the rule rather than the exception. These two objectives are the best guarantee of IEREST’s sustainability. The project has three main target users: potential, future, present and past Erasmus students, teachers in higher education, and HEIs’ stakeholders and policy makers. IEREST is carried out by seven partners (University of Bologna; Durham University; University of Savoy, Chambéry; University of Helsinki; University of Primorska, Koper; University of Leuven; the Open University), which have complementary expertise, ranging from study abroad, Erasmus mobility and internationalisation, to intercultural education and communication, intercultural language education, and open education. The project has also three associate partners, which represent the main IEREST target users: students (AEGEE-Europe), teachers (AEDE-Hungary) and international affairs officers and stakeholders (T.M.Kempen). Initially, the project mainly focused on obtaining a multi-faceted overview of the needs of the target users with respect to intercultural education for studying abroad. This overview was conducted by means of cycles of literature review, a student questionnaire (3,152 responses) and three focus groups, each with representatives of a different target group. The overall study provided crucial input for the design of the teaching activities. At present, four pre-departure teaching activities for Module 1 have been completed, and are designed to promote the ideas that people are different but also similar across and within countries, and have multiple identities. These are being tested in five of the IEREST partner institutions. They will then be fine-tuned and published online. The same overall implementation methodology will be used for the modules to be taught when students are abroad and upon their return (the piloting will take place respectively in autumn 2014 and spring 2015). The project website and newsletter are the main sources of information about the project objectives and outcomes. The newsletter subscription form is available through the website: http://ierest-project.eu/.
2014
Ana, Beaven; Claudia, Borghetti
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11585/592989
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