DIVERSITY – Including Migrants through Organisational Development and Programme Planning in Adult Education
Assessing and validating the DIVERSITY modularised training
DIVERSITY – Including Migrants through Organisational Development and Programme Planning in Adult Education – is a 30-month international project co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Commission.
It involves a Consortium of seven Partners from six countries, i.e. Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Ireland, and Italy; its objectives consist in:
- Accompanying the EU Adult Education system in the mentality shift from focusing on migrants as very specific target groups and preparing them for integration into society
- Raising awareness about migration-related diversity, its challenges, and its opportunities (referring to cultural and pedagogical but equally to economic aspects) with managers and planners in AE as well as policy makers
- Equipping managers and planners with the skills needed to open AE providers to migrants as a regular target group
To do so, during proposal Partners foresaw four macro intellectual outputs, conceived as follows:
1. An in-depth mapping activity on Diversity-informed dynamics and operational practices within the organisational dimension of Adult Education Providers: a cross-national assessment that involved both primary and secondary resources (via interview and focus groups) and resulted in a very comprehensive executive report collecting relevant trends, overall dynamics and success studies on effective education and training practices for migrants in selected European countries;
2. The development of a modularised training curriculum that enables managers and planners in adult education organisations to re-focus both their organisational structures and their course programmes to recognise and include migrants as a regular target group of their educational activities. The curriculum is structured into two major categories, organisational structure and programme planning, and each module is fully EQF-compliant aiming at learning outcomes on level three to four. The modules are to be “mixed and matched”; each module might be conceived as a stand-alone training unit but can also be combined with any other module, which maximises adjustments to the individual needs of managers/planners and their organisation. In terms of structure, each module consists of:
– A short summary of the module
– A brief description of the knowledge to be acquired
– A brief description of the skills to be acquired
– A brief description of the personal abilities (responsibility and autonomy) to be acquired
3. Testing and Validation of the modularised training curriculum with 100 target groups from the represented countries (including staff of the participating organisations, as well, since they are crucial for rooting the staff training in the partner organisation and therefore for a sustainable long-term continuation of the trainings). The project is currently in this exact phase of development – under the precious guidance of the Greek partner HAEA, the Consortium agreed on the outline of the underlying tasks in terms of general timeline and distribution of the work. Partners proposed and discussed what the most suitable means of delivery and the overall methodology they will rely on to conclude such delicate activity are for them.
4. Finally, the last months of the Project’s lifecycle will be dedicated to the development, review, publication and mainstreaming of the so-defined “Policy Recommendations”; a collection of findings, insights and experiences from the DIVERSITY project aimed to:
– inform evidence-based policy formulation
– provide policy recommendations
– identify actionable measures for stakeholders
Standing from an evidence-based perspective, the paper represents a sort of operational memory of the project and will be used to expose where policy making, policy change or policy deregulation can support the transformation of adult education providers towards organisations open for migration diversity.
In the Project, IHF asbl brings its expertise and experience as a key social player in international and European projects. In particular, IHF asbl ensures the “European Dimension” of the Project as it carries out all the technical tasks from a “European Perspective”, i.e. carrying out analysis of relevant EU policies and initiatives; extrapolating EU relevant case studies, lessons learned and best practices.
For further information on DIVERSITY and other IHF asbl initiatives, please visit:
DIVERSITY Website: https://www.aewb-nds.de/themen/eu-programme/diversity/
