How to make international students feel at ease in a foreign country ? Many universities try to do their best and find their own ways and solutions to make the transition as easy as possible. Since a couple of years a new annual award was launched by NUFFIC to stimulate universities to make students really feel welcome and at home in their host country.
This year's Orange Carpet Award went to ArtEZ, Institute of Arts in Enschede, for their successful project called Memento.
The idea of this project is based on a quotation by the author Mark Twain:
“I'm grown old and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.”
The concept of MEMENTO involves the visualization of recollections (memories) and their presentation in a joint exhibition.
The supervisory instructors of the exchange programme stimulated the students the past months to share their personal memories with fellow students from different cultures. To what extent are there important differences in the process of recollecting? Are there also similarities? And are these similarities universal or are they determined by specific locations and/or cultures? All these memories can be related to images, music, film, photos, smells and/or stories.
I feel this is indeed an excellent way to have students work together on a collective assignment during their exchange programme.
Here's a link to some more information about this intriguing project and good practice. You can also check out their blog.
This could also be an idea to work out further for our own international course, even though we do not have any arts students.
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