ELISSE Project: E-Learning for Intercultural Skills in Social Education Erasmus Project

Project Title

ELISSE Project: E-Learning for Intercultural Skills in Social Education

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 2017

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Migrants’ issues; Research and innovation; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

The general context marked, paradoxically, by globalization and the art of living together, but also by the return to fundamentalism, exclusion and ostracism, the need to find a local identity of their own, has pushed the different actors of the ELISSE project to focus on empirical practices to stimulate reflection and participate in training in interculturality. The question of interculturality is becoming more and more acute in all countries, in professional fields and in several sectors of activity. The reception of migrants in all European countries with increasingly complex situations of precariousness challenge social workers who often lack the appropriate skills to understand and enter into a relationship of trust with people.

The exploratory work carried out prior to the project has identified a certain number of needs expressed in the face of the limitations of working in a multicultural context:
– the training of social workers using tools and modalities of action in a multicultural environment,
– Make the internship experience a time to acquire valuable and transferable intercultural skills,
– Improve and strengthen distance learning skills with the use of adapted tools.
The analysis of these different needs identified has led to the identification of two interdependent principles of action:
1. an internship experience abroad as a support for intercultural training,
2. Modular hybrid training delivered at a distance thanks to e-learning platforms and face-to-face in the trainee’s host country.

These principles of action guided all the implementation work during the 3 years of the project launched in 2017. ELISSE is a human adventure, a research-action, rich in encounters and intercultural sharing. The potential of ELISSE is to rely on digital tools to offer modular training accessible in any professional context where questions of interculturality arise, in an interconnected world of cultural diversity.
The project has brought together a multidisciplinary and cosmopolitan team that is the very test of interculturality. It is composed of teachers/trainers in social work, pedagogical engineers, teacher-researchers in human and social sciences, among others. This project, which brought together 4 continents (Africa, Europe, Asia, North America), 10 countries (Ivory Coast, Senegal, Vietnam, Madagascar, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Netherlands, Canada, France), then 09 with the departure of Italy, has an international scope.
This phase was a time of intellectual production and creation of pedagogical tools for students and teachers in social work. It produced the following results:
– a training program taking advantage of the period of internship abroad for the acquisition of transversal skills around interculturality.
– training tools linked to the training course to allow a rapid increase in skills and professionalization,
– a skills repository to situate the expected skills,
– a trainer’s guide to allow any professional wishing to duplicate,
– a project website,
– a Youtube channel with testimonials,
– several dissemination tools.
The materials produced, which are in English and French, are mainly intended to prepare students before their departure, during their international internship and upon their return, so as to best integrate intercultural skills in the continuation of their training and their professional career.
The student exchange flows between the different partners have had a considerable impact in raising awareness of intercultural facts and, above all, the need for training in order to acquire the skills to act in a multicultural context. This has resulted in a strong demand from students who were not part of the test phase and an integration of course modules in the initial training and practical training support even if the students do not go abroad. Also, field professionals from all sectors (health, education, etc.), through the webinars organized, have expressed the need to benefit from support to transfer the training contents and adapt them to their context. This is the first comprehensive training in the social work sector on interculturality and which considers interculturality as a set of skills. The benefits are therefore enormous, hence the objective of consolidating the work by applying for a European Certificate of Intercultural Competencies (CECI) and opening it to more encompassing themes such as social inclusion through a new project phase.
For more details, please click here : http://elisse.itsra.net/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 235917 Eur

Project Coordinator

INSTITUT DE TRAVAIL SOCIAL DE LA RÉGION AUVERGNE & Country: FR

Project Partners

• ISTITUTO PROGETTO UOMO – ISTITUTO SUPERIORE UNIVERSITARIO DI SCIENZE PSICOPEDAGOGICHE E SOCIALI
• STICHTING AVANS
• Haute Ecole Bruxelles-Brabant (HE2B)
• Cégep Marie-Victorin
• PPIISD – Escola Superior de Educação de Paula Frassinetti