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Ongoing international partnership projects

Teacher Education (TE) in universities has remained one of the least internationalised subjects in higher education. Yet, teachers are expected to educate future generations to become global citizens. In other words, students of teacher education are so far ill-equipped to transform their prospective pupils into individuals with a global mindset.

DITE focuses on the element of internationalisation to increase capabilities of future teachers by sensitising TE students to international perspectives. We know from the Erasmus Impact Study 2014 and various follow-up studies that mobility is not the solution if we want a large percentage of students (90%+) to be reached by internationalisation. Therefore, DITE relies on internationalisation at home (IaH) to develop a model of globalised teacher education through diverse internationalisation with a focus on students becoming teachers in upper secondary education.

We are going to learn about the status quo of the internationalisation of teacher education in our countries. Gathered information will become a basis for the series of trainings for the academic teachers who teach students of teacher education and for students as well. We are going to present a model and guidelines for implementing DITE in other insitutions. We are aiming at creating a network of organisations from within and outside the consortium. This DITE network will build on dissemination efforts and ensure long-term sustainability by keeping the DITE spirit alive.

A project consortium is created by 6 institutions focused on different aspects of internationalisation of higher education: University of Szczecin, Poland (a project leader) and Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland, University of Porto, Portugal, Rovira i Virgili University, Spain, Global Impact Institute, Czech Republic and SGroup – Universities in Europe.

More about the project is available on the website: https://dite.usz.edu.pl/

The Inclusive Comprehensive Internationalisation (ICI) project is a Cooperation Partnership co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

ICI project aims to provide intercultural and global learning opportunities for all students, regardless of their background or orientation and support them in their development into globally responsible professionals and citizens.

The ICI project works to enhance the quality of international learning experiences by developing an inclusive comprehensive approach to internationalisation which includes virtual and blended international learning opportunities.

This is achieved by:

  • Creating enhanced awareness and engagement at HEIs pertaining to the need for an inclusive and comprehensive approach to internationalization
  • Enhancing the capability of actors within HEIs (academic staff, educational developers, administrative staff and students) to act as co-creators of inclusive, comprehensive approaches to internationalisation and to collaborate across the boundaries of their own areas of professional expertise, academic discipline, and different international and intercultural contexts.
  • Promoting critical approaches to internationalisation, aimed at evaluating the inclusivity of an institution and at uncovering the ‘hidden’ messages that contradict or undermine the inclusivity of the internationalisation activities.
  • Promoting the adoption of virtual and blended modalities for a digital, comprehensive and inclusive approach to internationalisation ensuring long-term quality, coherence and efficiency.

More about the project is available on the website: https://iciproject.org/

The project aims to combine different methods to strengthen the profile of the teaching profession and transform the language learning through extensive reading into an exciting adventure for pupils. Research studies show that students exposed to extensive reading become better readers, they write better, their listening and speaking abilities improve, and their vocabularies get richer. LIRE will equip teachers with comprehensive methods and tools to support and enhance their teaching practices.

The target groups of the LIRE project are mainly English language teachers teaching at primary and lower secondary education. It is also focused on pupils in primary and lower secondary education (8 – 14 years old) studying English as a second language and teacher training providers such as universities, continuous training providers, and language associations.

The aims of the project are:

- to equip English language teachers with up-to-date, innovative, and tailor-made methodological materials and relevant competencies to enhance primary students’ foreign language;

- to create a bespoke training and an open interactive space for English language teachers to gain and exchange know-how and improve their teaching practices further;

- to develop pupils’ literacy, critical thinking, analytical and communication skills, creativity through a new approach to learning a foreign language.

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This project aims to provide students and teachers of Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) with a multilingual online course which allows them to acquire the competencies needed to successfully teach languages in a specific context.

The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) created to this end will be available in Croatian, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Slovenian and Turkish.

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The project "Teacher Education About Multilingualism" (henceforth TEAM) aims to educate pre-service and in-service teachers in HEI settings about various aspects of multilingualism and bilingualism (the term bilingualism will be used to capture both). Basic and up-to-date knowledge about bilingualism is often missing from teacher training curricula in HEIs across Europe, bilingualism often being mentioned in the context of educating students with special educational needs. This situation is unsatisfactory in present-day Europe, where migration both within the EU and from non-EU countries is a major contributor to demographic change. Teachers who have been working in previously homogeneous communities are increasingly more likely to have students with the experience of migration in their classrooms, both migrants and re-emigrants. Against this background, it is vitally important to provide teachers and future teachers, as well as other education professionals, with basic knowledge about bilingualism and multilingualism in the context of education.

Therefore, TEAM aims to:

1. strengthen the professional training of teachers and other educators in HEIs by preparing them to better deal with linguistic and cultural diversity in the classroom,

2. prepare teachers and other educators to better respond to the needs of students with migration backgrounds by making their teaching more socially relevant and inclusive,

3. improve the quality of academic instruction by creating a new interdisciplinary course curriculum and teaching resources linking teacher training with relevant and up-to-date bilingualism research.

In order to meet these objectives TEAM will develop an innovative and flexible course and an open education resource that will make state-of-the-art, research-based knowledge about bilingualism available to pre-service and in-service teachers in HEIs. To bring research results into the classroom, audiovisual learning materials will be prepared in the form of interviews with leading researchers in the field of bilingualism, along with accompanying learning activities. The materials will be used either as a separate course, or to complement existing modules and courses at partner universities in both traditional classroom and/or blended-learning environments. Once all the learning materials and activities are classroom tested, an open education resource of teaching materials and learning activities will be created and made available to students and academic instructors, practicing teachers, other education professionals (e.g. educational psychologists, speech therapists, counsellors) as well as other interested stakeholders (e.g. parents of bilingual children). To ensure high quality of the final course and the TEAM resource, all the learning materials and activities, as well as the TEAM open education resource, will be externally peer-reviewed by experienced university teachers and bilingualism researchers from partner universities across the Bilingualism Matters network.

It is estimated that ca. 500 students will take the course at partner universities as either an obligatory part of their teacher training or as an elective during the project lifetime and the course will be incorporated into teacher training curricula after the project's completion. Well over 300 academic instructors, teachers and other education professionals are to be involved in multiplier events run in 9 countries. The TEAM open education resource will be made available freely to students, academic instructors and other education professionals and stakeholders beyond the current partnership.

Through educating teachers, TEAM aims to promote informed attitudes and approaches towards bilingualism in education, which should lead to more informed decision-making at all stages of education and in a variety of educational contexts, which in turn should increase educational opportunities of children with the experience of migration and should facilitate integration of migrants into their recipient communities in the longer term.

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The project aims to initiate, strengthen and expand international cooperation in face of challenges which migration society posits. So far migration as a social and educational issue has been almost exclusively dealt with on a national and national language-specific basis. In order to benefit from the experiences of others and to expand and improve the existing practices in the area of in-service and continuing education of teachers and, if necessary, to supplement university teacher training, the consortium plans to work jointly towards specific goals. The main aim is to support school teachers in delivering effective instruction in linguistically heterogeneous classes. In doing so, we will be guided by the assumption that both newly immigrated as well as multilingual pupils who have been living in the country for a longer period of time and were born there should be taken into account.

Although multilingualism has been an established feature of schools within the European Union for years or even decades, the range of in-service training courses and support materials on offer is still insufficient in terms of quantity and could be expanded in terms of quality. On the basis of the training courses prepared in the project, teachers will learn, for example, (1) how to adapt teaching materials from various subjects to the level of the school language knowledge which particular pupils have at their disposal and (2) how to didactically support them with the teaching principle of scaffolding. In this context, general language instruction is taken into account as well as subject-oriented language instruction and language-sensitive instruction in the subjects. Although the project’s target beneficiaries are teachers, pupils and parents within the area of school education, there is considerable potential for these end-products to be exploited in other relevant sectors, e.g. vocational education of adolescents, informal education of adults, or pre-service teacher training.

The project will develop: (1) a handbook introducing theories and pedagogical approaches of language and register-sensitive teaching; (2) a training concept and materials which can be used in continuous professional development of teachers as well as an accompanying e-learning platform (3). In addition, the project partners will produce multilingualism and register-sensitive teaching materials for selected subjects and prepare a series of videos for pupils’ parents showing how to support their children in developing their individual multilingualism and establishing literacy practices (4).

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The project aims to enhance the study of ancient history and geography by means of the multidisciplinary, multilayered, interactive and user-friendly self-learning ATLAS of the cultures of Ancient Europe before Romanisation. The ancient peoples outside the Greek-Roman world are the "minorities of the past", whose heritage is often neglected in the school system. The ATLAS will provide the European citizens with an overall view of the most ancient European heritage, which will be objectified on a map, a powerful visual tool in learning the past. The map refers to a territory which, in the present as well as in the past, continuously develops and changes its borders.

Two are the main objectives of the project:

- increasing in European citizenship a deeper awareness of the common European cultural outside the Greek-Latin world. The SELECT project assumes as most relevant to reconstruct the overall historical geography of peoples settled in ancient Europe, which have let a written sign of their presence. A chronological range from the oldest written documents in the 8th century BC up to the Romanization era (2nd-1st cent. BC) is set. The geographical area covered includes the European countries where written documents are known in the chronological framework set above: from Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Austria, to Switzerland, Slovenia, Northern Greece (excluding the Greek dialects) and the Balkans as far as the modern Turkish border;

- providing the European educational systems with a self-learning tool for the study of the ancient world, boosting at the same time their digital competence;

The Project partnership consists of high profile research and educational institutions and  technological SME, with validated expertise in the fields required for the project. The partners are the three Universities of Genoa (IT), Zaragoza (SP) and Poznan (PL), two research centres, Ausonius-CNRS (FR) and Alteritas (IT), two High Schools, in Świdnik (PL) and El Pontde Suert (SP) and two technological partners, F|E|F (FI) and NCLOUD (IT). The project will take advantage of three Associated Partners: the Musée Champollion de l'Écriture of Figeac (FR), the University Library system of Liguria Region (I) and the French Association of teachers of classical humanities CNARELA.

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In the current context of increased migration, FFL (French as a foreign language) teachers need to take the reality of these societal transformations into account in order to fully participate in the construction of an inclusive and pluralistic society. The transnational European cooperation project, "DECLAME'FLE - Development of a FFL (French as a Foreign Language, FLE, in French) Collaborative Space: Literature, Learning, Migration, Exile" seeks to meet the challenge of intercultural dialogue by drawing on contemporary literature on migration and exile (French acronym: LIME) and to offer new open educational resources (OER) to teachers and trainers of French as a foreign language in initial or continuing education.
For the three European partners of this project (France, Slovakia, Poland), LIME offers a forum for mediation and the exchange of human experiences and constitutes the foundation for education in contemporary debates.

A new approach to literature in FFL didactics calls for innovative teacher training: DECLAME'FLE's mission is to provide a digital collaborative space designed as a toolbox comprising methodological, didactic and pedagogical tools that are modular and co-constructed by the community (corpus of contemporary works, pedagogical scenarios, innovative collaborative workshop support sheets, skills map, enriched manuals, interactive watch and glossary).

Revisiting the didactics of literature (including both corpora and learning methodologies) to achieve a more efficient learning of a foreign language also requires new pedagogical teaching methods, in both face-to-face and distance learning – using ICTE and virtual classes, running collaborative and participatory workshops (in Hackathon or kick-off format ) – , representing a range of new innovative models created by participants, illustrated and available on the DECLAME' FLE platform.

The innovation here lies both in the resources produced and in the collaborative pedagogical mechanisms implemented to create the resources in question. In DECLAME'FLE, all the actors (university students, external professionals) share their experiences, collaborate among peers, and participate collegially in a new production. The project taps into collective intelligence, sharing and shifting the teaching posture (from direct transmission to the co-construction of knowledge and skills). The proposed measures are part of a truly transductive European strategy: none of the elements can exist without the others and each partner is therefore essential to the project as a whole.

At the end of the project, the DECLAME'FLE Collaborative Space will allow all audiences to have access to the OER and adjust them in order to achieve their own pedagogical or learning objectives. To carry out these actions successfully, to encourage productive dialogue on a European scale and to create the conditions for a sustainable exploitation of the results, the structuring of a DECLAME' FLE network on a European and international scale will complete the system so that other users (teachers, trainers, heads of language training institutions) can exploit it and adapt it according to their own objectives and according to their needs.

In the long term, the European transnational project DECLAME'FLE will have promoted:
- the revisiting of FFL didactics in its curricula and university training
- the co-construction of new OER knowledge and resources, both didactic and pedagogical
- new pedagogical, transnational, collaborative and participatory practices
- the development of new advanced ICT and digital skills.

The Collaborative space DECLAME'FLE will allow:
- the circulation of European open educational resources (OER) for the didactics of French as a foreign language

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The aim of the project is to develop an educational program and tools for teachers and apprentices to evolve the language skills and behavior of young people, so that they can use their linguistic potential when using German in various school settings. The project’s results are expected to contribute to the promotion of multilingualism in Europe, both through a comprehensive understanding of the problem of multilingualism at school or in everyday life, as well as multilingualism resulting from migration, and linguistic support in DaF lessons (German as a foreign language), DaZ lessons (German as a second language) and other classes (maths, physics, etc).

In order to implement these assumptions, a consortium was established consisting of representatives of four partner countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Poland), each of which has a project team. Thanks to the collaboration of the project team and partner countries, a concept is created to operate with different products, which are first developed and then piloted in the classroom in all partner countries. During the implementation of this task, partners from all countries conduct mutual observations of the lessons, evaluate them according to the developed criteria and adapt them to the optimization of products, which include:

- theoretical, interdisciplinary model of language promotion in the context of multilingualism,

- reflective profile for observing the situation of multilingual teaching in the classroom with the use of the linguistic resources of the teacher and students,

- lesson scenarios with sample suggestions for teaching and learning foreign languages,

- lesson recordings that provide example situations for analyzing multilingual teaching in teacher education and training.

All developed products will be included in the comprehensive action plan in the form of a manual. The project is intended to be a sustainable concept for the perception and appreciation of multilingualism in the classroom and at the same time to symbolize the added value of international cooperation.

The aim of the RiTE-project is to promote and facilitate (student) teachers to create an evidence-informed teaching practice in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. In this project, (student) teachers are stimulated to use evidence from educational and scientific research to experiment and innovate their teaching and learning processes. With evidence-informed teaching practices we allude to the use of current relevant research to plan lessons. This project responds to two major challenges of our societies on a European dimension: 1. It addresses the current challenge of evidence-informed decision-making in an age where pieces of evidence are increasingly ignored by policy makers world-wide and the amount of information is increasingly complex leading to initiatives such as EU4FACTS; 2. It addresses the need that the European Commission has recently put down regarding the strengthening of initial teacher education (ITE) and continuous professional development (CPD) (EC, 2015). We perceive educational settings as decisive for educating later decision-makers for evidence-informed policies who need role models in their teachers. Consequently, we endeavour to apply the strategies of evidence-informed policy making (Breckon & Dodson, 2016) to ITE-settings. who have a shared interest in research in teacher education and teaching practice.

During the RiTE-project, (student) teachers are stimulated to use scientific evidence from educational and science research to experiment and innovate their teaching and learning processes.
In phase I all partners will use their specific teacher training context to conduct case studies in which materials are designed to integrate evidence-informed practices for cohorts of at least 15 student teachers per partner. The intended outcome is that the cohorts of students will develop more solid skills to integrate research in their current and future teaching practices (research literacy). The strategies and developed resources will be presented in five different case studies, which will serve as learning resources for the second phase.
In phase II at least five teachers from each institute (who were students the year before) will be monitored and supported in their first year of in-service teaching in maintaining their evidence-informed teaching practices. One of the support structures will consist of the materials created in the first phase. Using a multi-method approach with log-files, focus groups and interviews, the five locations will analyse the collected data to come to useful recommendations for other ITE institutions and other organisations that would like to get more evidence into their teaching practices.

The support structure developed in the RiTE project will consist of three components:
1. a multimedia website including five case studies (movies, articles, resources), one for each RiTE partner, that presents how they designed a teaching and learning trajectory in which they integrated evidence-informed practices. The digital open and accessible environment contains tools and equipment to organize actions aiming to support teachers in searching and translating scientific information to use in their teaching practice using instruments for preparation and evaluation, lesson study, or individual action research, to innovate their teaching practice. (O1)
2. a report with the empirical validated support structure and recommendations of participating teachers and teacher educators about how they managed to maintain their research-informed perspective. This report will be offered for publication and is about the insights into the way (student) teachers meaningfully search for, read, interpret, and translate scientific information and evidence from educational and science research when conducting small scale experiments, and into what factors in the school environment influence teachers in creating and developing a evidence-informed teaching practice. The information in the report forms the input for other publications and conference contributions to disseminate the results. (O2)
3. a European Support Network of educational researchers, teacher trainers and teachers in which literature, lesson materials, expertise, and experiences are shared regarding creating and embedding an evidence-informed practice. (O3)

After the EU funding ends the universities will be able to continue to use the results, intellectual outputs, products and materials in the courses of their respective curriculum of their teacher training programmes. The network will be incorporated and further extended within the DUDOCnetwork (www.dudocnetwerk.nl), the EAPRIL’s cloud communities, and embedded into the Scientix community. Through these platforms and communities, the results and intellectual outputs of this project are maintained and disseminated.

This project designs and disseminates a strategy to achieve the fundamental European goal of redesigning Higher Education, facilitating the application of Bologna principles across Europe. The objective is pursued through the design of an integrated curriculum where the delivery of academic content is coterminous with, and enhanced by, the acquisition of competences and transversal skills appropriate for the digital age.

Our chosen disciplinary area is the Humanities, because it is considered a bulwark of traditional and conservative behaviour, and an area that needs support in identifying direct links between academic studies and employability/professionalization.

Objectives of the project are:

- to survey current activity and best practice in the teaching of Humanities in the participating institutions and countries;

- to develop and showcase innovative pedagogies and provide recommendations for the best ICT applications for competence teaching at university level;

- to design digital learning environments that support blended learning and active students' participation.

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TestU Online is a free of charge, multilingual, online e-learning platform enabling easy and fast creation of various quizzes, tests, and exercises primarily intended for learning languages. The platform users will be mainly teachers, coaches/lecturers as well as their pupils, who are attending elementary schools, or other forms of education, whether formal or informal.

The reasons for creating such a platform can be explained by the necessity for allowing a young generation to access free education despite their socio-economic, religious, or national background, geographical limitations, or even various kinds of disabilities. While there are similar platforms available already, they are usually very limited in their functions, they are not that comprehensive, not very easy to use or even they require a fee to access them. The lack of such a free platform, in general, is especially obvious during the current times of the worldwide pandemic as many people are at the moment physically prevented from accessing educative institutions, either because the schools are shut down, or because they might be in quarantine themselves. In order for people to continue educating themselves during such times, there is a crucial need for projects which allow for easy and fast creation of learning materials, which could be used both online or offline.

Our target group will primarily consist of the teachers and lecturers who may find the use of our platform very useful as it will allow them to very easily and quickly create new tests and exercises for their students or simply use one of the existing test or quiz uploaded in the system previously created by another teacher. Furthermore, the teachers and coaches could use this platform in order to find out crucial information about their pupils, and thus be able to adapt the teaching according to their personal needs. As an example, assigning a quiz through TestU Online would allow us to find out information about their students, such as how fast they respond, which types of mistakes they make, when is it that they respond, how long does it take them to answer certain questions, etc. The pupils could get feedback instantaneously, and they might find the interactive way of learning more fun and entertaining as opposed to the traditional lecture-based approach, which does not provide the same level of interaction. A modern approach to learning through TestU would result in a boost in their motivation and attentiveness.

During the project, most activities will be directly dedicated to the development of the intellectual outputs including the development and design of the website, analysis, and didactic methodology for the classroom and online usage, but for the most the creation of the content (quizzes, tests, and exercises). We will devote time to assessing the current situation and addressing the needs of our target groups.

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Mapping and Organizing Research on Dictatorships: Open access Repository (M.O.R.D.O.R.) is a Erasmus+ project, co-funded by the European Union focusing on improving general education on authoritarianism and to prepare recommendations for EU foreign policy stakeholders regarding democracy support.

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The project itself focuses on acquiring and deepening skills for use of modern didactic methods and principles in the teaching of humanities and social sciences in the higher education sector. The main goal is to improve teaching of these study fields at universities by developing the skills of all employees involved in teaching in accordance with the demands of the labour market and today's society. This goal shall be achieved thanks to four main outpus of the project. The first two will be analyses examining the psychosocial and intercultural aspects of teaching allowing to identify essential findings, which will serve to further support the following output. This output will be a handbook that will offer an innovative methodology for teaching in the given fields. As part of the final output, this methodology will be adapted to digital form within e-learning, which will help its further dissemination. All results will be freely available, and the final one will be finished at the end of 2024.

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RENPET is an Erasmus+ Jean Monnet Network of ten major universities across Europe and a leading pan-European professional academic association. RENPET builds on the strong cooperation established through the 2014-2017 ANTERO Network and the 2017-2020 NORTIA Network. RENPET fosters cutting edge research, translates that research into innovative teaching and professional development and actively engages in policy debates among our powerful powerful epistemic community.

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Through numerous language policy initiatives on the one hand and new findings from language teaching research on the other, existing input-oriented language acquisition and learning models have been replaced by an output- and competence-oriented language acquisition and learning perspective, at the same time demonstrating the complexity and dynamics of language acquisition by multilingual individuals. Above all, however, the introduction of the Common European Framework of Reference (CFR) (Council of Europe, 2001) has led to national curricula changing the progression of learning towards a process-based perspective on language learning, and to the addition of pedagogical aspects such as intercultural learning, media competence and other personality-related competences (ability to work in a team, critical competence). In spite of all these substantial changes, most textbooks and teaching materials for German are still backward-looking, which proves to be most explicit in countries with German as an official language (or minority language) coexisting with other speech communities (Italy, Belgium, Poland, etc.) and those with an increased demand for German as a foreign language in many fields (Sweden). In these countries, the promotion of German is generally falling short, which most prominently emerges in teaching wanting in innovation and pedagogical measures that are modestly successful.Against this background, the project aims to use the expertise of an international consortium in the field of German as a foreign and official language to develop, implement and evaluate learning scenarios that provide in-service and pre-service teachers with pedagogical support for collaborative and learner-centered teaching in present-day heterogeneous classes. Joining expertise in a transnational consortium of this kind will make an essential contribution to the national curricula involved (in particular to the systematic improvement of their teaching quality) and will thus meet the special needs of German in the different countries. The project sets for itself the following objectives:* Promoting and supporting a comprehensive approach to language teaching and learning, capitalizing on the diversity of today's increasingly multilingual classrooms.* Supporting synergies with research and innovation activities and promoting new technologies as incubators and drivers of improvements in language and culture pedagogy.The project combines both the expertise of academic partners with proven experience in language teaching research, teaching materials design and development, and in- and pre-service teacher training (Universities of Bozen, Antwerp, Louvain, Poznan and Gothenburg), as well as the practice-oriented profile of the Belgian German Teachers' Association and school partners representing the different teaching contexts targeted in the project, that will contribute to support the development, evaluation and dissemination of the learning scenarios through integration into the relevant professional networks and the numerous associated schools and institutions, safeguarding the transfer between theory/research and practice.The project will impact on the level of the students, the (trainee) teachers, and the subject-specific school teams and learning communities for German.