Cooperatively Transmediate Erasmus Project

Project Title

Cooperatively Transmediate

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 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Romas and/or other minorities; Civic engagement / responsible citizenship; Inclusion – equity

Project Summary

The context of our project is represented by the social meeting places, both public and private, where people experiencing fragility (in our project, especially asylum seekers, refugees, homeless, and Roma gypsy women) meet “social workers”; these workers often complain about not having adequate competences and skills to manage efficiently this kind of meetings, a situation which negatively affects also the organisations in which they work.
This proposal could constitute a pilot experience promoting multidisciplinary learning and social inclusion under the key topic of peer and community mediation. For “community mediation” we do not only mean mediation taking place in neighbourhoods, but a wider process consisting of various actions (cultural, social, educational, etc.) whose objective is to work for a specific community (being it a prison, a hospital, a University, a private organisation, etc.) and, within it, to move from mere coexistence to real social intercourse. These actions should create the conditions by which such communities can explore new ways of preventing, managing, and transforming conflicts, not only thanks to the intervention of an external third party (professional mediator), but empowering themselves in the process of being trained in peer mediation and acting as peer mediators. Peer mediation is widely known and applied in schools where children and young people help their peers manage conflicts in a constructive and non-violent way (although not so much in the Countries participating in aCT). There are, though, other kinds of peer mediation being experimented, for example in prisons, also by the Coordinator.
The general objective is to promote mutual awareness on the part of both university students, faculty and organisations of the sector in order to develop competences and skills in community and peer mediation; such development could help current and future professionals to foster their own employability, as well as their interpersonal and socio-educational development. The project takes into account previously funded EU and other international projects, promoting the design and the creation of innovative outputs in the field of peer and community mediation.
As to participants, the project foresees the following: university students (Economics, Nursing, Pedagogy, Social work, Tourism, Translation) and faculty, professionals of the relevant sectors (see above, but not exclusively), volunteers and potential or actual users of mediation services (including disadvantaged people).
To reach this goal, the aCT partners will carry on several activities, ranging from international learning and training proposals (a foundational peer and community mediation course, a peer and community mediation summer school and a training-for-trainers module) to local or national-scale ones, such as all the research tasks leading to the design and the development of the community and peer mediation research study, the testing of the peer and mediation pilot course and the relevant trainers’ toolkit.
The methodology used is based on action-research theory and practice, as well as on the basic principles of mediation: involvement of as many key-actors as possible, listening to their needs and perceptions, make potential conflicts emerge and turn them into a growth opportunity, fostering self-reflexivity, and empowering participants in order to make themselves heard and to be trained to act as peer mediators. This methodology will be reflected into the aCT peer and community mediation handbook.
One of the main intangible outcomes will be interprofessional and intersectorial exchanges of competences and skills, as the ones foreseen in this project, that could help future and present workers to tackle and prevent conflicts, to communicate in a positive way and to consider diversity (generational, cultural, gender, etc.) as an asset.
The expected impact will be a multi-level one: nevertheless, the first and most numerous beneficiaries will be the students participating in the experience, whose active and horizontal participation in all the phases of the project is here explicitly foreseen; secondly, the partner and non-partner Universities, that could introduce the outputs into their curricula.
The long-term impact on other non-academic organisations and public local authorities will be based on the positive effects of the project on the mediation market: with an insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the peer and community mediation approach and in synergy with other mediation sectors that are more developed in the three partner countries and cities (especially, family, cross-cultural, and legal mediation), mediation services could be designed and thought of as an asset for any recipient, and something that accommodates economic concerns when it is conceived as internal organisational and peer mediation.

Project Website

https://act.unige.it/en

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 236780 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI GENOVA & Country: IT

Project Partners

• UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID
• INSTITUTO POLITECNICO DE BRAGANCA
• FEDERACION RED ARTEMISA
• Associazione San MarcellinoOnlus
• Associação Centro Ciência Viva de Bragança