Inclusive Campus Life Erasmus Project

Project Title

Inclusive Campus Life

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 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Disabilities – special needs; Inclusion – equity; Access for disadvantaged

Project Summary

University College ‘Thomas More Kempen’ was granted a KA2 project from Call 2016 (Erasmus+ action). The consortium consists of campuses in Finland (Lapland University of Applied Sciences), Belgium (Thomas More), The Netherlands (Hogeschool Utrecht) and The Czech Republic (Palacky University). Together with the ‘European Association of People with Intellectual Disabilities and their Families’ (Inclusion Europe) all these institutes of higher education committed themselves to having students with intellectual disabilities participate to university life. More detailed information can be found on the website of the project at the following address: https://www.iclife.eu.

The overall goal of the ‘Inclusive Campus Life’ (ICLife) project is to make life on a campus for higher education more inclusive. More specifically, ICLife promotes and supports the inclusion of People with Intellectual Disabilities (PID) in campus life. Regular higher education students and students with intellectual disabilities will be able to follow their personal study path while enjoying campus life. People with intellectual disabilities will take courses fitting their aspirations and will be involved in teaching activities as life experts. As such they will teach higher education students. The delivered learning materials, training and dissemination activities may document and transfer these innovative practices to European universities and stakeholders in a sustainable way.

The idea to open up campuses for students with intellectual disabilities comes from Thomas More, based in ‘the charitable city’ of Geel, Belgium. Geel is renowned for its system of family care for psychiatric patients. Since the middles ages already, patients with mental or/and intellectual disabilities have stayed and lived with families in the surroundings of Geel. Patients live with foster families, help in the households or with farming life. This inspiring history provided a quit natural context to allow the initiation and elaboration of this project.

The main project objectives are:

(1) Continued Education for students with intellectual disability on a Higher Education campus.
(2) Integration of students with an intellectual disability in the teaching process for regular students and staff.
(3) Making the campus accessible for people with intellectual disabilities.
(4) Documenting and transferring inclusive concepts and methods.
(5) A self-certification instrument to objectify the degree of inclusiveness towards People with Intellectual Disabilities.

The five full partners of the IC Life project each worked with a number of organizations at the national level. In this way we realized this project together with twelve associated partners. Each partner held regular meetings on a national level with the associated partners of their country. This information was incorporated into the outcomes, the tools and the transnational project meetings. Adittionally, there was an advisory board with universities and organizations working with the target group. During the project, these organizations were invited for input twice.

We realized as promised 6 outcomes, 5 events and 2 training sessions. It proved innovative indeed to work together amongst universities for creating inclusive campuses. Integrating people with intellectual disabilities as both students and teachers is not common. It was a unique approach to include the target group into the project activities.

The intellectual outcomes are the following:
– How to make a campus more accessible
– How to organise a buddy system for students with intellectual disabilities
– How to involve PID in teaching activities
– How to organise work placement for PID
– A screening Framework & ICL Monitor
– A Change and Communication Plan

For each outcome we created an easy-to-read version and a number of ‘tools’. These are specific and compact manuals for developing activities at universities that want to work with PID.

The main impact of this project consists of the improved collaboration between PID and regular campus attendees. This was objectified by the evaluations of the events and other project activities in mix settings. We hope this may be inspiring and useful to other Europan universities as well.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 351215 Eur

Project Coordinator

THOMAS MORE KEMPEN VZW & Country: BE

Project Partners

• Stichting Hogeschool Utrecht
• UNIVERZITA PALACKEHO V OLOMOUCI
• INCLUSION EUROPE AISBL
• LAPIN AMMATTIKORKEAKOULU OY