Newsletter Programme Internationalisation of Education
Destination:
WORLD
Winter 2016/2017
Work in Progress
Preface
Featuring our Projects
Reflections by Ellen Hey Work in Progress Internationalisation of Education (IE) among many things is a process via which individuals and groups are enthused to move. Certainly, IE is about moving abroad for a while, facilitated by one of the EUR’s programmes for student- or staff-exchange. Moving abroad gets you out of your comfort zone. Think of renting an apartment in a city that is unknown to you or understanding the grading system at your host university.
Within the Strategic Programme Internationalisation of Education we have all been working hard on the projects. Read a short update on what’s going on… and what’s in it for you!
IE is also about moving away from doing things the way you have always done them and experimenting with new ways of engaging. New ways of engaging may involve familiarizing yourself with new social habits, such as those involved in the relationships between students and professors. New ways of engaging also may involve familiarizing yourself with different approaches to your area of study or research. Think of the critical approaches that EUR staff stimulate their students to adopt, which is baffling to some of our international students. Moreover, new ways of engaging involves developing and implementing policies that will enable us to recruit international students and staff and subsequently enable those students and members of staff to fully engage in our community. These ways of engaging require us to move and to get out of our comfort zone. Developments in the Strategic Programme IE show that the EUR and all its component parts are on the move.
Teach a summer course at the Rotterdam Summer School 2017? The Rotterdam Summer School is still open to lecturers who would like to offer a summer course in 2017. Putting your course on the RSS website is easy with a little help from the RSS staff. Click here to get an overview of what’s involved in setting up a summer course and what the summer school can do for you! Or contact Ad Hofstede, 82090 or hofstede@erasmusacademie.nl Ellen Hey Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam
In this newsletter:
In this newsletter:
Do you have a great idea for a new master? We want you! Contact Mijke Zeegers or Gwen de Bruin if you have an idea for a new international or innovative master. We will help you develop your idea and have funds available. Sharing our internationalisation passion The third Global Education Café was hosted in late September, early in the morning. The Erasmus Pavilion was jam-packed with colleagues who joined this breakfast meeting to share best practices and discuss topics on the theme of Exchange. In the spring, we will host our fourth Global Education Café so if you have any best practices you would like to share with us and other EUR colleagues – let us know!
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Featuring our
Sharing
Sharing Best
Development
News &
Projects
Milestones
Practices
Possibilities
Events
Colophon Destination: World is a quarterly newsletter of the EUR Strategic Programme Internationalisation of Education. Editor Carien van der Wal Text editing Roger Staats
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Destination: WORLD magazine
Photography Rick Keus, Conny Mooldijk Portrayed on cover Koen Stapelbroek Contributors Gwen de Bruin, Marjo Gallé, Emma Hamilton, Trika Harms zum Spreckel, Ellen Hey, Mark den Uil, Carien van der Wal, Mijke Zeegers
Published by Academic Affairs/ Internationalisation program Designed by Ontwerpwerk www.eur.nl/internationalisation
We also proudly announce that the pilot training course Teaching in the International Classroom was held in November. Read more in this digizine. Looking for mobility funding? EUR has been very successful in its Erasmus+ applications for mobility scholarships to non-EU universities. A new call will be submitted in February. If you would like to strengthen the cooperation with your partner university with funds for student and staff mobility, please contact Mijke Zeegers. More info on the Erasmus+ website. EUR Buddy Programme pilot We will run the first pilot of our EUR-wide buddy programme for the international students arriving in December and January. Thanks to strong cooperation, ESN, IO EUR and the faculties will work together to recruit buddies and develop
selection procedures. An EUR-wide general buddy training course will be organised to prepare the buddies for their important task: to give our international students a warm welcome and make them feel at home. Adding network value Although several networks exist (for example LERU, EUA), recently, two new European wide networks have started afresh: the Guild of European Research Intensive Universities and Aurora. Being part of an international network helps strengthen the EUR’s international reputation, creates new options for education and research partnerships, and improves the chances of success when tendering for international projects. We will look at the added-value of joining these new networks. Additionally, our team has been working on identifying promising candidates to set up our own network. Agency selected: EUR virtual experience to launch in 2017 After listening to four inspiring pitches, we were able to choose an agency for the EUR virtual experience. The pitches provided us with ideas on what we need to develop in order to give international prospects a better idea of the ‘feeling and vibe’ of Erasmus University before they make a final decision to apply or enrol. Learn more about the winning concept here. Travelling abroad? Materials to help you promote EUR When travelling abroad, if you have any opportunities to talk to influencers or prospective students, please let us know. We have sets of materials and tools that you can take with you to help build an awareness of EUR’s range of offerings, including new PowerPoint presentations for international audiences. E-mail Trika for help. Faculties teaming up: on the road to building international EUR awareness EUR has visited India, Mexico and UK in the autumn, as well as being present at EAIE, CIS, and more than 20 international school fairs or presentations. So, many thanks to the inspiring teamwork from RSM, ESE, and ESHCC in particular for taking the larger EUR story on the road.
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Sharing Milestones
Not in Kansas anymore Tim de Mey, FWB (participant of the first course Teaching in the International Classroom) When Dorothy enters a novel and apparently grim environment in The Wizard of Oz, she famously says to Toto, “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Although Rotterdam is hardly Oz, and although there are few wizards to be found among our staff, we can empathically imagine that international students might, initially, have similar feelings of sudden nostalgia, disorientation, and perhaps even distress. However, neither are our teaching staff in Kansas. To foster and exploit the creative potential of the international classroom, it’s not enough merely to embrace diversity, nor to acquire and sharpen “intercultural competences”; rather, it requires a thoughtful pedagogical strategy.
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In the inspirational course Teaching the International Classroom, trainer Ginie Servant (EUC) encourages and actually provokes the participating lecturers to carefully consider, reflect on and discuss international educational interaction with each other. Moreover, she triggers lecturers to start transforming the content of their courses, and to create new and optimal learning situations for all students in the international classroom. In one of the most uplifting sessions she surprisingly reveals that all scientific domains lend themselves to collaborative city-to-world projects; the sessions have even resulted in concrete interdisciplinary collaboration. I warmly recommend this course to all lecturers who recognize that creating a ‘truly new Kansas’ is of pivotal importance in the international classroom.
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Sharing Best Practices
Staff mobility
Koen Stapelbroek, Senior Lecturer FSW on staff mobility, lectures at the University of Venice. “For the fourth consecutive year, I’ve been able to use the staff exchange programme, and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to all my fellow lecturers. An Italian colleague with who I worked on publications thought that I should give a lecture to his students so they could experience a different kind of lecturer. And this gave me a glimpse into a different educational tradition, while normally you only work together with international colleagues on research: a definite win / win situation. If it was only about the education itself, I would have found this somewhat limited. The beauty is that it has also given me the opportunity to broaden my network of research contacts. We work together on research funding, publications and seminars, and as part of the exchange, try to integrate teaching and research.”
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“In Italy I also teach bachelor students in Italian. I learnt the language when on a student exchange in Turin. Being taught by a ‘foreign’ lecturer is a sort of mini-exchange for the students, instead of them coming to us, the lecturer comes to them!”
“In comparison with the Netherlands, the Italian educational system is reputed to be somewhat ‘traditional’. A great difference that I experienced was that lecturers hold a sort of ‘consultation hour’ where you as a lecturer are present and can really offer something more personally to the student. That’s long been taken out of our ‘modern’ educative programme, which is understandable, but I feel that it’s something we’ve lost. Reflection on other academic cultures provides valuable and critical perspectives regarding our own academic culture.” “It wouldn’t really be ridiculous, in our efforts to become an international institution, to embed the functional benefits of staff exchanges in some form of covenant or strategy.” For more information about staff mobility opportunities in Europe: scholarships@eur.nl
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Development Possibilities Erasmus University encourages staff to take part in the TOP training and development platform (TOP). Miranda Smit and Monique Goense, who together run TOP, share their vision: TOP identifies the learning needs within our organisation’s divisions. Based on these, we work alone or with others (RISBO, LTC) to provide a wide range of training materials and courses for all EUR employees. These vary from personal development to ICT and communication training. We have also made this training programme as accessible as possible for our international staff. A number of the courses are taught in English, including Career Development, an Excel course, and a course on Funding proposal writing. We are working hard to quickly extend our English-language programme. We very much encourage our Dutch colleagues to enrol in the English language courses. Inclusivity is one of the EUR’s key drivers. In this regard, our Diversity Officers have developed the Implicit Bias training programme, designed to give our employees insights into any ‘unconscious prejudices’ they may have. Our courses make increasing use of blended learning, a
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mix between ‘physical’ and online learning. This means that our employees can participate in our courses whenever it suits them best. https://www.eur.nl/management_bulletin/archief/2014/ managementbulletinno24/top/
Building bridges Language is key to building bridges and knowledge transfer. As a teacher you play an important role in this, so check out the Language & Training Centre (LTC) and see how they can help you. The Language & Training Centre (LTC) is the expertise centre and partner for language testing, language training, and communication skills training courses both for EUR staff and students and for external clients. We offer a wide range of competitively priced, high-quality courses for students, employees, alumni and anyone else with an academic background. To be able to perform well within an international working environment, you need to have excellent multilingual communication skills. One of the university’s aims is to be recognized as an international institution and a pre-condition for achieving this is that staff have an excellent command of English. To achieve this, all support staff at the EUR have had an extensive English language assessment. Lecturers need to be able to perform well in the international classroom, so they must have at least a C1 level. Would you like to find out more? For support staff, take a look at the language level matrix which has been set for your job. https://www.eur.nl/bv2013/introductie/tweetaligheid/ taalniveaus/taalmatrix/
Executive Board has provided extra funding for students to attend language courses in 2017. One of the EUR’s core values is Inclusion. The university wants to give more refugee students the opportunity to start a new or continue their study at the EUR. Therefore, we have, and in this we are unique, initiated an accelerated course Dutch for this group. Normally, it can take them three years to take the state examinations, but here they can qualify in 1 - 1.5 years. We are happy to be able to work with the student initiative Erasmus Language Sharing (ELS) on this. We help them with the webshop and we train the student coaches in ‘Working with Groups. ELS also gives students the opportunity to practice their languages, to discuss things with each other, and to put what they have learned in theory into practice. This fits in perfectly with our aim to deliver global citizens. Students who speak two or more languages fluently have something extra to offer in an international environment.
Menten: “to help academic staff who are required to teach in English to achieve the required proficiency, they can take part in the RISBO University Teaching Qualification programme course ‘Teaching in English’. We work closely with TOP, and all our courses are available via their platform.” Lecturers educate students to become global citizens who can apply their learning in teams wherever they are in the world. To achieve this, it’s essential that they can communicate in a number of languages. Therefore, the
Marjon Menten, Head of the Language & Training Centre (LTC)
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News & Events Job marketing
International Student Skills week (spring 2017)
A new track preparing international master students for a career in the Netherlands or abroad has been developed as part of the ESL MyFuture project. Six activities will be organised between November 2016- March 2017, ranging from a goal setting workshop, a training on job marketing in the Netherlands, to a Coach CafĂŠ, where international students can meet young alumni in their field of study.
21st century skills are becoming increasingly important for graduate employability; these are highly valued by Dutch and international employers. In the International Student skills week, we organise several workshops (e.g. the CV Check: application letter and CV), information sessions (Working in the Netherlands) together with other activities such as the coach cafĂŠ with alumni, a LinkedIn photographer, and a search & selection company that recruits international students. This is all provided by the EUR Career Services in cooperation with other organisations like Magnet Me.
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Also check out the upcoming events and workshops for Dutch and international students: https://www.eur.nl/careerservices