This study module aims at enhancing cultural awareness as a key skill in Early Childhood setting.

Globalization has the last decades turned national and local communities into migrant societies. ECEC is an institution in which children, guardians, parents, and staff from various backgrounds and with multiple belongings meet. This gives ECEC a key role in creating inclusion and belonging in dynamic communities influenced by local and global concerns.

The course will enrich students’ knowledge and skills for leading and guiding processes of creating belonging in children’s groups, cooperating with a diverse group of parents/guardians, finding practical, enjoyable, and efficient ways of working as professional staff requires high level of intercultural competence.

Transcript of Records is an official document issued by your home university. It specifies the name of the institution, the academic programme you are enrolled in, the list of courses taken up until the current period, the exams or tests you passed, the grades and the credits you earned. 

Transcript of Records

Motivation letter is a personal statement and it might include a brief introduction of yourself, explanation why are you interested in the learning opportunity you are applying to, any relevant experience or skills that you have, your goals and how this opportunity will help you achieve them, This document should not be more than 400 words.

Motivation Letter

University of Stavanger

Critical Cultural Awareness in Migration societies

Early Childhood Education and Care

Critical and innovative thinking

Inter-personal skills

Global citizenship

This challenge addresses an often-neglected dimension of diversity and inclusion which is ‘age’, particularly ‘minor age’. Adultcentric bias can create barriers in recognizing the capacities of children and youth to contribute to society as they can be pre-judged to be ‘incompetent’ or ‘not-yet developed’ due to their age. Raising critical self-awareness of adultcentrism among adults in educational contexts can support them to develop more age-inclusive attitudes towards children and youth in daily life. However, this process of raising critical self-awareness related to one’s own adult age can bring up emotional responses e.g., fear, guilt, insecurity, denial etc. that can create obstacles in the learning process of adults and might worsen intergenerational differences.

The central challenge in this course is to propose a game to be used by adults to raise the awareness of the psychological concept of ‘adultcentrism’ among adults in educational relationships with children and youth.

A key ethical question in developing a game for this purpose is whether the design of such a game is age-sensitive towards adult learners.

The participants work in a Challenge Based Learning framework to propose a game designed for raising critical self-awareness i.e., of adult-centric biases, among adults in educational relationships with children and youth. The activities include readings, podcasts, teamwork, lectures and workshops. Participants will work part-time, digitally, over a period of three months. There will also be the opportunity for a 5-day visit to the University of Stavanger, but this part can also be attended online.

Adultcentrism in Educational Relationships

Creating Awareness of Adultcentrism in Educational Relationships through Game-based Learning

Intra-personal skills

Intercultural skills have been recognized as the top-valued skills for not only employers in various industries but for education from the earliest age. Multilingualism goes hand in hand with intercultural competencies, and is already a stated goal for EU-education and a need in increasingly diverse working and living contexts. Therefore, the aim of the course is to explore and critically evaluate the key issues in research on intercultural competence and multilingualism, especially from the standpoint of teacher education and foreign language teaching.

Art-based Research Methods in Intercultural Competence and Multilingualism

Exploring, analyzing, and using various research methods

This study module aims at enhancing cultural awareness as a key skill in Early Childhood setting.  

Globalization has the last decades turned national and local communities into migrant societies. ECEC is an institution in which children, guardians, parents, and staff from various backgrounds and with multiple belongings meet. This gives ECEC a key role in creating inclusion and belonging in dynamic communities influenced by local and global concerns.

The course will enrich students’ knowledge and skills for leading and guiding processes of creating belonging in children’s groups, cooperating with a diverse group of parents/guardians, finding practical, enjoyable, and efficient ways of working as professional staff requires high level of intercultural competence.

CV (Curriculum Vitae) is a document that summarizes your educational and professional history. It must provide a detailed overview of your academic and work experience, skills, achievements, and qualifications.

**Cultural Diversity**

An increasing international migration, with a growing welfare gap, contributes to new challenges and demands for citizens and social and welfare workers more specifically. A transnational framework captures the cultural diversity in a globalized world. This course emphasizes cultural diversity within welfare systems and intercultural practices, by addressing families separated by distance and national borders, which forces them to negotiate and maintain family relations with multiple societies across borders. The course provides insight into transnationalism, migration and return migration.

Cultural Diversity

The course seeks to facilitate participants to reflect upon intercultural practices in diverse contexts

**Course description**

We are living in a time of energy innovation: growing need for energy supply, energy (in)security, changing markets, climate change and other driving forces increase the need for new technological solutions. The resulting advances affect patterns of wealth, trade, power, and politics worldwide. These processes have an important international dimension and cannot be understood without taking international affairs into consideration. In this course, we study energy innovation from this international point of view. State involvement in energy innovation is an important starting point in that regard. Industrialised as well as upcoming countries are currently in a race for yielding the benefits of developing new energy technologies. Other countries struggle for their place in the future world of energy. By studying the race for energy innovation, the course aims at shedding a new light at the global energy transition. This includes the potential of international agreements such as Paris and organisations such as IRENA to distribute the benefits of energy innovation in a more just way. The module includes guest lectures from leading experts across Europe. 

**The challenge**

The topics of energy, innovation, and geopolitics are highly prominent in the academic literature. The concept of energy transition is central in that regard: it captures changes in the overall energy system, from one particular fuel source or technology to another. Numerous papers are dealing with these issues, many new papers are being published almost daily. Furthermore, the topic is becoming more and more prominent on the curricula of universities across Europe and worldwide.  

Energy innovation is an important aspect of today’s energy sector. Almost daily, we hear about the introduction of new processes, methods or devices that somehow improve how energy is being generated, transmitted or used. Classic economic theory assumes that these novelties are produced by the dynamics inherent to the capitalist, private economy. In that view, state intervention to change the overall energy system works against the progress (that is innovation). 

However, the energy sector is unique in a sense that state involvement – one way or the other – is very strong. The reasons for this can be found at the international level. The energy sector is of fundamental importance for the functioning of the economy; the state therefore has a high interest to ensure energy supply. Moreover, the state has an interest in keeping its national economy competetive. The energy sector is an important economic sector in many countries. State involvement is therefore very high.  

In short: energy innovation needs to be understood in relation to state policy, not least policy in response to pressures coming from the international level. The motives behind the promotion of energy innovation by the state (for example through science parks, university research projects, subsidies, or public private partnerships etc.) are, however, not mecessarily directly apparent. With this challenge, we want to shed light on the connection between energy innovation, state policy, and international affairs. 

**Exam information**

Your task will be to identify a significant case of energy innovation in your area (city or region) and to find information material about it (for example websites, brochures, policy documents, interviews, or surveys sent by email). Furthermore, you will describe this case by finding answers to the following questions:  

What are the motivations and/or driving forces behind this case of energy innovation? 

Is this a case of private enterprise or is the state involved in any way? 

If the state is involved, in what form does it take part? 

Why is the state involved? 

Does the information material about the case refer to the national economy? 

Does your case include a form of international cooperation? 

In the exam (short essay), you will discuss the information that you have collected against some of the contents of the course. This must also be presented at the end of the course.

Energy Innovation Across the Globe

Study module and a practical challenge on energy innovation worldwide

Energy and sustainability

This challenge addresses an often-neglected dimension of diversity and inclusion which is ‘age’, particularly ‘minor age’. Adultcentric bias can create barriers in recognizing the capacities of children and youth to contribute to society as they can be pre-judged to be ‘incompetent’ or ‘not-yet developed’ due to their age. Raising critical self-awareness of adultcentrism among adults in educational contexts can support them to develop more age-inclusive attitudes towards children and youth in daily life. However, this process of raising critical self-awareness related to one’s own adult age can bring up emotional responses e.g., fear, guilt, insecurity, denial etc. that can create obstacles in the learning process of adults and might worsen intergenerational differences.

The central challenge in this course is to propose a game to be used by adults to raise the awareness of the psychological concept of ‘adultcentrism’ among adults in educational relationships with children and youth.

A key ethical question in developing a game for this purpose is whether the design of such a game  is age-sensitive towards adult learners.

The participants work in a Challenge Based Learning framework to propose a game designed for raising critical self-awareness i.e., of adult-centric biases, among adults in educational relationships with children and youth. The activities include readings, podcasts, teamwork, lectures and workshops. Participants will work part-time, digitally, over a period of three months with a 5-day visit to the University of Stavanger.

## The Challenge

Learners will work together to acquire skills and competencies related to the physiopathological basis of the reproductive system, infertility, and influence of lifestyle on reproductive health. The ultimate goal is to integrate and apply this knowledge in identifying and solving real problems in the area through the implementation of multicultural working groups. During this challenge, priority will be given to innovative and experimental teaching models, such as challenge-based in a blended learning approach that combines virtual and face-to-face mobility

## Impact

The participants will develop cross-cutting and transdisciplinary knowledge in reproductive health lifestyle. This challenge will also promote new forms of international mobility that allow an increase in the number of individuals with an international mobility experience in higher education, while also promoting collaborative and cooperative work skills through the experience of active teaching and learning methodologies. This intensive blended program is aligned with the strategic development plan of the Department of Medical Sciences, within the scope of its internationalization policy, as well as with the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, namely for Good Health and Well-being (Goal 3), Quality Education (Goal 4), Gender Equality (Goal 5), and Reduced Inequalities (Goal 10).

University of Aveiro

Lifestyle Influence on Reproductive Health

Resilient communities

This micro-module is based on the idea of developing solutions for the European Diploma  and Flexible Learning Pathways in an international environment during the summer school hosted in Poland. Paricipants, ECIU teachers,  will carry out in-depth teamwork in one of those topics. They will learn how to identify the challenge, obtain, and compile reaserch information and communicate the results in English on minimum CEFR B2+ level. The participants will be able to gain valuable creative problem-solving skills. This challenge is a chance to make a tangible difference in how we approach lifelong learning within the ECIU capacity. We invite teachers who are ready to create a meaningful change by benefiting not only themselves through skill acquisition, but also by making a valuable impact on the ECIU community.

Member university

University of Stavanger

Member university

University of Stavanger

Learning opportunities of University of Stavanger