International Teachers for Tomorrow’s School – System Change as an Opportunity for Intercultural School Development and Mutual Learning Erasmus Project

Project Title

International Teachers for Tomorrow’s School – System Change as an Opportunity for Intercultural School Development and Mutual Learning

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Integration of refugees; Quality Improvement Institutions and/or methods (incl. school development); New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

Cultural diversity is an essential feature of the European school landscape(s). This can be primarily seen at the level of pupils, whereas the teaching staff is often not as culturally diverse. The professional re-integration of international teachers (including refugee teachers) is fraught with many challenges. Despite these difficulties, international teachers have been increasingly employed in schools in recent years. Their professional and pedagogical background as well as their language of origin can be highly beneficial for the schools – as it is shown by the first re-qualification programs at universities in Europe, that prepare for the professional re-entry.

International Teachers for Tomorrow’s Schools (ITTS) builds on these experiences. The main objective is to support the professional re-integration of international teachers, who already work in schools in their new countries, in a strength-oriented manner. By using diversity-sensitive approaches, ITTS aims to enable schools to integrate the new colleagues in the sense of an intercultural opening of schools. In addition, the project wants to strengthen system change as well as intercultural awareness in teacher training and continuing education at universities.

The project primarily focuses on newly immigrated teachers with a university degree and work experience. Their professional integration is usually accompanied by many formal and content-related challenges, and they are often confronted with explicitly and implicitly prevailing ideas of normality at the schools. This often leads to irritation and (one-sided) pressure to justify and to adapt to the system. ITTS wants to support international teachers and their new schools to critically reflect on these irritations and processes of othering and to collect examples and material to show the strengths of the new colleagues. In addition, the project will develop materials to address specific challenges associated with, for example, system change. This includes professional language skills, reflection and counselling. This way, ITTS aims to strengthen the new colleagues as well as their school mentors and aims to promote a diversity-sensitive opening of schools.

All in all, ITTS wants all participants to reflect on the challenges of system change as well as on their ideas of normality in order to provide them with alternative patterns of interpretation. It aims to strengthen newly immigrated teachers in the sense of empowerment and to enable a racism-critical integration or inclusion of teachers in order to take into account the requirements of schools in the migration society.
The project’s activities address several levels and target groups systematically that interact with each other: newly immigrated teachers themselves; school management and control groups for school development; mentors who accompany the new colleagues in professional practice; and target groups of university teacher training and further education.

The following results are expected for the target groups of the projects:
• Refugee and international teachers are strengthened by resource-oriented (professional language, patterns of perception) approaches.
• All those involved (from international teachers to mentors and school administrators) are able to reflect critically on their ideas of school normality and are able to derive changes for everyday practices.
• Processes of school integration or inclusion and intercultural school development are supported.
• The thematic concerns of the project (experiences with system change, reflecting on school normality, intercultural awareness) are embedded in the formats of teacher training and continuing education of the project partners.

In order to achieve a sustainable effect, the relationships and networks established during the project period as well as the developed concepts, materials and implementation methods will be integrated into existing curricula and/or working environments. This will be supported by products such as a transnational stocktaking and project documentation, the development of a portal (ITTS-Portal), the development of reflection and counselling materials as well as the integration of these contents into the universities’ curricula.

The overall aim of ITTS is to support the professional re-entry of newly immigrated teachers in the participating countries (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Poland, Slovenia, and Turkey) by means of a comprehensive approach at all relevant levels and to make corresponding impulses valuable for both schools and teacher training.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 405725 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITAET BIELEFELD & Country: DE

Project Partners

• KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN
• IZMIR EKONOMI UNIVERSITESI
• InterCultural Ísland
• UNIVERZA V MARIBORU
• AKADEMIA POMORSKA W SLUPSKU
• PANEPISTIMIO AIGAIOU