multiculturalism
E-Learning Courses program in Cultural Diplomacy
E-Learning Courses program in Cultural Diplomacy |
The Center for Cultural Diplomacy Studies has developed the Distance Learning department in order to offer and enable different programs to individuals who are interested in field of cultural diplomacy and related areas to have an opportunity to increase their knowledge and experience in this fascinating field.
The e-Learning department has developed and offers the following programs: Distance Learning: e-Learning Courses in Cultural Diplomacy & International Relations |
Distance Learning: e-Learning Courses in Cultural Diplomacy in Africa
Distance Learning: e-Learning Courses in Cultural Diplomacy in the Global Economy
Distance Learning: e-Learning Courses in Cultural Diplomacy & the Media
MA in International Relations and Cultural Diplomacy: The Euro-Mediterranean University (EMUNI) in Cooperation with the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy
MA in International Relations and Cultural Diplomacy: The Euro-Mediterranean University (EMUNI) in Cooperation with the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy
The degree is offered and awarded by the Euro-Mediterranean University (EMUNI University) in cooperation with the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (ICD).
Where: Germany: Berlin; Portorož – Piran, Slovenia
When: Year Round
Overview: Offered by the EMUNI in partnership with the ICD, the program will combine the traditional academic components of International Relations with a concentration on Euro-Mediterranean Studies and a focus on the role of soft power and cultural diplomacy in contemporary global affairs.
Multicultural Interdisciplinary Handbook: Tools for Learning History and Geography in a Multicultural Perspective
The aim of this Project is to build and share a set of tools that includes a HandBook, Digital Modules and a Teacher Training Course. They will offer a structured path through European Contemporary History and Geography where the countries concerned will be those of the Project partners.
Partners:
- University of Salamanca - GRIAL (Spain).
- Pädagogische Höchschule Tirol (Austria).
- Hafelekar Unternehmensberatung Schober GmbH – Innsbruck (Austria).
- Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres – Créteil (France).
- Universität Augsburg (Germany).
- Universität Siegen (Germany).
- Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia (Italy).
- Społeczna Wyższa Szkoła Przedsiębiorczości i Zarządzania (Poland).
Despite official educational guidelines, improved linguistic skills have been limited in all partner countries due to cuts in their national budgets. As a consequence CLIL experiences have been lessened, to the sole benefit of those involving English.
Another reason for this project resides in the difficulty in modifying the guidelines of national programmes, that are often short-sighted as far as other cultures are concerned.
Finally, all European reports point out the shortage of materials and ICT-based contests suitable for interdisciplinary and multicultural education in school.
The MIH (Multicultural Interdisciplinary HandBook) Project meets these needs by providing new tools that help teachers and pupils to plunge deeper into the culture and the language of another nation via its memorials, its history and its landscape/geography. Moreover, it intends to promote the common European identity, as it introduces a European perspective in the schools’ History and Geography programmes, which are usually confined to national borders.
The aim of this Project is to build and share a set of tools that includes a HandBook, Digital Modules and a Teacher Training Course. They will offer a structured path through European contemporary History and Geography where the countries concerned will be those of the Project partners.
Today, it is generally national guidelines that determine school programmes; school HandBooks and Didactics are based upon them. Going beyond the limits of the national programmes, and furthering the understanding amongst young people and their educators of the diversity of European culture, languages and values –the principal objective of the Comenius– we plan to operate at the level of the HandBooks and Didactics. The main purpose of the entire MIH project is to offer a tool for studying events through an approach that is both comparative and interdisciplinary: historical content will be organised based on underlying geographical realities dealing with such topics as borders, migrations, landscape and resources.
The cooperative work of selecting and drawing up the key topics, a major activity of the project’s core members, will provide the materials for designing a training course addressing current and future teachers that will emphasize the European dimension in teacher training.
The HandBook, available in the five languages of the partnership plus in English, can be used both by teachers interested in multicultural learning as well as by those involved in CLIL projects. In the latter case, teachers will have at their disposal the consistent path, the original documents and a general methodology that recent reports have shown to be missing. They will promote language learning.
The Digital Modules will be the final tool of the project. The modules will be available as free video podcasts, web-based contents (HTML) and standard-packaged Learning Objects (SCORM – IMS) in order to use them in any Virtual Learning Environment, so in class or for independent study by pupils; they will motivate pupils by supporting listening comprehension and oral production and represent an important contribution to the development of digital educational content.
The Project life is from October 2009 to September 2011. We expect to release the first beta products by September 2010.
MIH aims to:
- Further the development of a common European identity by having schools participate in the culture of other countries using their languages and their collective symbolic imagery.
- Contribute to the creation of a new generation of school HandBook and ICT-based contents that can support teachers involved in CLIL experiences, or who are simply interested in them.
- Implement digital educational contents in schools.
The results will be:
- A HandBook and Digital Materials, which deal with a choice of historical and geographical topics, selected among those that have had an important impact in the national imagery in the last two centuries. The final version of HandBook and Digital Modules will be available in all the languages of the partner countries.
- A Teacher Training Course addressed to both future and in-service teachers. The training develops the topics dealt by the HandBook and explains its methodology and issues.
The European Chain Reaction
Thirteen teachers worked together in this eTwinning project. They were each given access to the blog and everyone could upload their own video, the children could then watch the new entries on their digital school board or at home. Through entering, the children learned about science (creating the chain reaction), ICT (filming, blogging, ...), languages (commenting in English when their mother tongue was non-English) and other cultures (when watching the introduction videos of the other classes).
European CLIL Resource Centre for Web2.0 Education: Early-to-Long life
E-CLIL is European Union funded project to develop and build resources and a resource centre for the use of Content Language Integrated Learning (CLIL).
It focuses on language learning, learning strategies, multilingualism and multiculturalism. The project is being completed over 3 years and includes partners with a wide-experience of how to create CLIL content and the issues around CLIL.
There is an urgent need for specific materials, resources and guidelines for implementation which guarantee excellence in language learning. The mission of E-CLIL is to improve the quality of language teaching through the use of CLIL to drive the need for Europeans to speak their mother tongue plus two foreign languages.
The project process
The CLIL Centre has a three objectives:
- It will provide support to current and future CLIL education programmes all over Europe
- It will disseminate high quality and already proven materials and resources for content and language learning
- It will enrich teachers’ and children’s knowledge of other European cultures.
The project will build interactive activities, tasks and games, within a storyline, for the use of CLIL teachers. These will be translated in to the project languages.
The project will also build links and include resources to other evaluated CLIL resources across Europe.
There will be opportunities for educators around Europe to engage with the project through social network groups, by providing CLIL resources for evaluation and by using the resources produced by the project.
EDUinspirations 2011 competition: 12 projects awarded on the topic Mobility from Childhood to Seniority
During the conference in Sopot, on 18 October 2011, the EDUinspiracje 2011 competition awards gala will be held, during which laureates will obtain prizes, statuettes and diplomas. The winning projects and the ones awarded with honourable mentions have been subject of a special results dissemination programme implemented by FRSE, which includes the participation of the laureates in the conference and accompanying exhibition, as well as the dissemination of best practice examples in EDUinspiracje competition, both online and in print.
The underlying theme of EDUinspiracje 2011 competition organised by the Foundation for the Development of the Education System, a National Agency of the Lifelong Learning Programme was Mobility from Childhood to Seniority. The competition has been designed to identify the best projects implemented under the Lifelong Learning Programme and disseminate their results as best practice examples. The 2011 competition aimed to demonstrate the importance of mobility for learning at all stages of life and present the most valuable individual and institutional mobility projects.
The EDUinspiracje 2011 competition is correlated with the conference promoting the results of mobility projects implemented under the Lifelong Learning Programme entitled Mobility as a Tool to Acquire and Develop Competences from Childhood to Seniority held on 17-19 October 2011 in Sopot. The conference is organized by the Ministry of National Education and the Foundation for the Development of the Education System as part of Polish presidency of the Council of the European Union.
The selection of the leitmotif for this year’s competition is no chance decision. It demonstrates the importance the European Union attaches to promoting mobility in education and training at all stages of life.
The European Commission has taken several steps aimed at recognition of qualifications, experiences and competences across the European Union with a view of providing easier access to learning and employment opportunities in various countries. Therefore, the EC supports and encourages enhanced mobility of individuals and these implemented by enterprises and various organisations.
Referring to educational policy and strategy of the European Union, the competition aims to present wide mobility opportunities offered by LLP, its rich and diversified educational offer, which depending on the individual sub-programme is addressed to specific target groups: the youth – pupils, students, teachers; managerial staff; adults, and senior citizens.
Mobility may take various forms; courses, trainings, visits, exchanges, placements, study periods abroad, and involves individual, institutional and partnership projects. Mobility stands for activities related to raising competences acquired thanks to moving to different countries, learning from one another, exchanging experiences, or in other words; the internationalisation of the teaching and learning process. These activities should translate into measurable and durable results, which are useful, practicable and transferable. EDUinspracje competition has selected projects, in which mobility contributes to the introduction of changes aimed at improving the quality of education.
The competition is addressed to beneficiaries of Comenius, Erasmus, Leonardo da Vinci, and Grundtvig, which are the sub-programmes of the Lifelong Learning Programme, and Study Visits, which is a transversal programme. Laureates have been selected in two competition categories: individual mobility projects and institutional projects (implemented by host and sending institutions). Projects implemented in the years 2008-2010 were eligible for standing in the competition.
The following criteria have been taken into consideration when selecting the best projects:
- Importance and significance – was the project important and did it meet beneficiary’s needs?
- Effectiveness and profitability (cost-effectiveness and satisfaction)?
- Efficiency – to what extent mobility goals were met?
- Effect and impact – what is the relationship between project goals and overall goals of the institution, target group, system. To what extent benefits reaped by the beneficiary impacted a larger group of recipients/institutions?
- Sustainability of the results – will the project’s impact be maintained over a longer period of time, e.g.: transfer of knowledge, putting the experiences into practice? How will results be used following project completion?
In order to enter a project for the competition, you had to fill in an on-line application form and send applicable documentation to the National Agency of the Lifelong Learning Programme not later than on 29 April 2011. The documentation included a competition entry describing the project and the mobility, its results pertaining to individual competition criteria (providing answers to 10 questions based on project assessment criteria), a PowerPoint presentation illustrating the achievements of the mobility and scanned documents confirming the staging of mobility: Europass documents or other formal documents, such as a certificate confirming participation in a scholarship, training, course, or a certificate confirming the qualifications or formal recognition of a study period abroad.
In total, 189 entries were submitted for the competition. Following formal assessment at the National Agency, 134 entries were sent to external experts for further evaluation. The reasons for rejecting projects on formal grounds included lack of the required documentation and/or double entry. Top quality projects selected by external experts were recommended to the competition jury composed of representatives of FRSE, Ministry of Education, and Ministry of Science and Higher Education.
On 14 June 2011, the competition jury finally selected six laureates in two competition categories and awarded honourable mentions to 12 projects.
Competition results have been posted on FRSE website at: http://waloryzacja.llp.org.pl
Mobility as a tool to acquire and develop competences from childhood to seniority
The Polish Presidency of The Council of the European Union have an honor to invite you to attend a conference on „Mobility as a tool to acquire and develop competences from childhood to seniority” organized in Sopot on 17 -19 October 2011. The conference is organized by the Ministry of National Education in Poland and Foundation for the Development of the Education System (FRSE).
The main goal of the conference is to initiate the discussion on the role and potential of mobility in formal and non-formal education implemented as part of the LLP and Youth in Action programmes. The conference will constitute a great opportunity for exchange of views on better methods for using mobility results for social development and establishing institutional base, which will guarantee top quality mobility implemented under the next generation of EU programmes.
Detailed Goals: Presenting the offer and disseminating the results of education-related mobility programmes (LLP and YiA). The conference aims to present systemic and legislative solutions applied in various EU countries in order to provide conditions for mobility and recognising its results. During the meeting, diverse methods for applying mobility in the development of multicultural education programmes will be presented. Recommendations on mobility within the next generation of EU programmes in education will be drawn.
ESSIE Proceedings and Video Impression available
ESSIE´s Annual Assembly 2011 successfully attracted a wide range of participants, from universities, colleges, institutions, professional education, vocational education, primary and secondary education, as well as public and private organisations, networks and multipliers!
This truly expresses the transversal and complementary nature of Systemic Innovation.
ESSIE would like to thank all the Assembly participants, such as the Society members, volunteers, professionals, academics, interestees, invitees and article reviewers, who have all worked so hard to make the Assembly a big success, both in terms of organisation and scientific content!
The ESSIE Annual Assembly always is a definite mark on the calendar. It is an energetic event, providing the stage for many presenters to reflect on their research and practice, as well as on their struggles. The Annual Assembly brings together all distinctive individuals from the ESSIE Society, allowing them to participate in the Mission ESSIE has embarked on.
View the Video Impression and have open access to the proceedings and presentations.
Capacitar a las minorías lingüísticas a través de la tecnología: ¿qué camino seguir?
En este artículo se da primero una breve visión de conjunto acerca de cómo el concepto de cohesión social se ha venido utilizando en el marco de las políticas sociales y educativas, con especial énfasis en dos aspectos centrales y emergentes: la equidad social y la educación como bases para la cohesión social. Seguidamente, el texto estudia cómo la educación puede acometer el reto de eliminar las desigualdades sociales y promover la cohesión social, y presenta el análisis de un grupo potencialmente desfavorecido: los hablantes de lenguas minoritarias. El artículo estudia las percepciones de las minorías lingüísticas en la UE, explicando a grandes rasgos cuáles son sus desventajas educativas potenciales y en qué consiste la exclusión social a la que estas minorías deben hacer frente.
Posteriormente se proponen métodos para aplicar el aprendizaje asistido por medios tecnológicos para minimizar estos posibles riesgos. En este apartado se incluye la cuestión de la “fractura digital” y sus consecuencias para los hablantes de lenguas minoritarias. Asimismo, se aborda la importancia del uso de las tecnologías para concienciar a la “mayoría” sobre las cuestiones que tienen que ver con la enseñanza en lenguas minoritarias (incluyendo la promoción de las numerosas ventajas del multilingüismo en la sociedad). Se presentan igualmente algunos ejemplos de prácticas de aprendizaje asistido por medios tecnológicos que se han instaurado para mitigar las desigualdades educativas que sufren las minorías lingüísticas. Por último, el artículo estudia el papel del aprendizaje asistido por medios tecnológicos en las prácticas pedagógicas, la formación del profesorado y los recursos permanentes para el perfeccionamiento del mismo.
Formación a distancia de profesores en una zona rural de Kenia
En África, la situación relativa a la brecha digital, las diferencias sociales en el acceso a las tecnologías de la información y su uso y, en particular, el retraso en la implementación de la infraestructura necesaria para garantizar su disponibilidad y uso, no es adecuada. Sin embargo, cabe destacar que el proceso de globalización está contribuyendo a una penetración progresiva de las nuevas tecnologías en el continente africano. Pero la población no solo debe poder usarlas, sino que también debe ser capaz de promoverlas, gestionarlas y regularlas. Esto es importante porque las TIC tienen importantes consecuencias tanto en las prácticas sociales como en la cultura local.
Este artículo presenta un proyecto piloto de e-learning para profesores que se lleva a cabo en el distrito de Gwassi, una zona rural de Kenia. Empezamos con un resumen del contexto nacional y local, para luego pasar a considerar cómo la cultura media entre el individuo y la tecnología. Por último, analizamos la situación local e ilustramos el contexto y las cuestiones estratégicas en las que trabajan actualmente las distintas partes implicadas en el proyecto.