“Teaching Culture! Teacher Training in intercultural Awareness” project (Supported by the program Socrates-Grundtvig I: 110651-CP-1-2003-DE-GRUNDTVIG-G1)
This project’s aim was to train teachers to improve their methodological and teaching abilities to train adults and their intercultural knowledge, as well as their competences in the use of new communication models in a creative and effective way.
“Teaching culture!” highlighted the intercultural communication integrated concept, cultivating the intercultural knowledge of teachers and students. “Teaching Culture!” connected twelve participants from eight European countries: Germany, Austria, Denmark, Spain, Ireland, Lithuania, United Kingdom and Sweden, developing a training course whose objective was to train the adult education teachers to be trained on how to deal correctly with the intercultural issues in the life of the growing European community. In this case, participants shared their experiences in are from adult education and teachers’ education to online learning and cultural education. During the training course, teachers were immersed in an intercultural learning situation and from there shared their experiences in the learning modules they developed and experimented with their adult learners.
“Teaching Culture!” developed and implemented an innovative approach which was methodological and educational, which took into account holistic concepts of teaching-learning, social contexts focused on the learner, strength of the autonomy when it comes to accessing to information, informal learning situations and a group of learning strategies through multiples means that clearly imply knowledge and intercultural competence in adults’ education within a multicultural Europe. In that context, the intercultural competence was considered as a continuous learning process that allows to train the population of European countries and also the growing number of working immigrants on the experience and benefits from a day-to-day intercultural exchange.
Basing on the fact that teachers are not prepared to integrate intercultural communication issues in their lessons, and that even foreign language materials just include facts (many times stereotypes) about the meta culture, (be they national or business cultures) rather than supporting intercultural competence, the project was focused on teaching intercultural knowledge taking into account, at the same time, the different teaching-learning cultures. Hence, this initiative was based on two budgets that are currently in force: intercultural contents have gained importance in international education in the last decades, and adult education evolved from training on skilled aimed at the content (computer skills or creative skills) to training for working, living and learning in international contexts. People from FUNIBER have taken part in this project, who contributed to the program and also enriched from the experience on intercultural education, on line training and on attending diversity problems in education.