Diversity Icebreaker

Browsing the web for summer schools in the field of social work, I hit upon a new and valuable tool. That is to say: new (and valuable) to me. In fact the concept has been in development since 1998, the tool was validated a number of years later and at the end of 2008 a prize was subsequently awarded for its international breakthrough.
So what am I talking about?
For starters, Diversity Icebreaker is a 42 item questionnaire with 3 dimensions (Red, Blue and Green) that you can score in around 15 minutes and can be used in team development, kick-off seminars, project training, management development programs, change management processes, communication and diversity training.
The website claims: "The test is easy to use and a more positive alternative to Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), TMP and Belbin Team Roles."
And the bonus is, the instrument is available in 19 languages and free of charge ;)
Up to now, within our school of social work we have worked with the concept of Belbin and his team role theory which is often an eye opener for our students when working together.
The difference with Diversity Icebreaker seems to be that the instrument was developed in a more socially constructed way, reflecting interaction patterns more than just personality and self knowledge issues. The real focus appears to be more on social construction processes that take place in and between groups, identifying both actor-observer attributions and prejudices as a natural part of this.
Filling out the questionnaire is only the starting point of it all. The actual focus is on learning about how such concepts are created and how participants’ perceptions of the other are shaped. The value lies in the collective reflection on these perceptions and the group’s ability to choose, revise and develop concepts of the other.
Reviewing the tool like this (based only on the information displayed on the website), I'm convinced that this is definitely a tool to be tried out and applied in our course programmes where much emphasis is on team work, and in year 2 in particular on multidisciplinary team work.
Another idea would be to introduce this tool in the EDDILI project where the RMA approach takes centre stage. It's especially the potential of opening up a dialogue on diversity and diversity processes that makes it worthwhile to apply in one of the RMA training sessions. After all, it makes participants reflect, listen, talk and act.

CMV visits Poland

Last April, from the 19th till the 23rd, our year 2 CMV students went on a study trip to Poland, to Jelenia Góra to be precise. Some year 3 and year 4 students joined them on the trip. As we have a bilateral agreement with the local university, Kolegium Karkonosze, we had also arranged a meeting between the Polish and the Dutch students, which was for all involved fun and educational at the same time.
On the one hand a number of cultural and social organisations were visited, such as an arts centre, the cultural centre, an ecological foundation, a day care centre providing art therapy for mentally handicapped people and a police station.
On the other hand, much effort had been put into arranging meetings between Dutch and Polish students where they could get to know each other. In order to let them work together students were split up into mixed sub groups of four to work on a number of assignments, such as interviewing a relative of the students' family.
The Jelenia Gora region, called Silesia, was hit by massive ethnic cleansing after world war II. By interviewing family members students automatically touched upon the topic of migration, a familiar issue for people from Rotterdam.
Last but not least, there was also a cultural programme. The beautiful Grodziec castle (dating back to 1155) was the venue where it all took place. To sample the atmosphere, just have a look at some of the pictures.

On one of the last days, a visit was paid to Wroclaw, the capital of Silesia. Some of the Polish students from Kolegium Karkonosze were willing to be our guides and showed us the museum island, the panorama of the battle of Racławice and the magnificent Rynek, Polish for the Main Square.
There was terrific cooperation on the part of Kolegium Karkonosze and its students. But we also got terrific cooperation from all the organisations we visited. The Poles know what it means to be great hosts and the Dutch were pleasant guests.
We intend to organise this study trip for all our year 2 students on an annual basis. Here some more pictures of the trip that was accompanied by Han Bakker, Hilde Koops and Hans Donders.

this is integrity

Values.com | Pass it On Billboards Integrity

Shortly after returning home from the 2nd meeting of our Ethical competence project, I stumbled on the values.com site. Integrity happens to be one of the 20 values we identified at the 1st meeting (see earlier post). This site is such an interesting way of visualising and drawing attention to values, that I just needed to pass it on. Actually, the site encourages everyone to pass it on.
Browsing the site with interest, I was also charmed by the large selection of inspirational quotes, made accessible via tags.
It was this quote by Maya Angelou that sums up the site for me: “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Wonderful resource for us, not in the least because of the video materials too.

Teaching ethical behaviour ?

“It was your responsibility!”, just a random remark I picked up during our European Grundtvig project meeting in Palermo, when something went wrong. Just one of the many comments that we often hear people make when they want to remind others of particular expectations that they had as regards the performance of a task that was not carried out satisfactorily or as expected. Somehow we all have our own (implicit) standards and norms. However, only when something goes wrong or turns out a failure , suggestions, remarks, hints but also outright criticism are expressed that point to a code of conduct that was hidden from sight before the incident took place.
Such incidents often give rise to discussions, debate or (preferably) dialogue, but can potentially lead to frictions. They alert us to the fact that one’s own perspectives and values may differ from others. Now suppose we could identify and establish universal (and perhaps even perennial) values, would conflicts then be erased from today’s world? Or is it naive to expect that a universally adopted code of ethical conduct will prevent any future friction?
Even though I usually have a positive (perhaps sometimes idealistic) view on life, there is no doubt in my mind that in the practical application of such a universal code of conduct multiple decisions and choices can be made in similar contexts.
Still, if we then decide that identifying common ethical values or formulating a common ethical code of conduct is a hopeless task, I feel we would be missing an ideal opportunity of sharing views and harvesting the benefits of finding common ground on an important issue such as ethical behaviour. No matter what the outcome will be, all people involved in this collective exploration of coming to a joint code of ethical behaviour will benefit. It will provide them with a variety of perspectives, clarify different approaches and increase understanding of their own points of views in relation to others. After all, the actions of individuals are largely shaped by social experience.
As someone working in education the ensuing question for me is: can we teach ethical behaviour and if so, how ? Wasn’t it Socrates who said: “I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.” and similarly Galielo Galilei : “You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself." Then there is also Plutarch who said: “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited." It is this approach to educating people, combined with serious dialogue that should be the way to encouraging students to express ethical behaviour and which will continue to be valuable in times of change and globalisation.
Why am I reflecting on this? I’m after all not a lecturer in ethics; I’m just an interested layman in ethical issues who started collecting resources on ethics on the web via the delicious bookmarking site (click here for a direct link), when we were on the point of submitting an application for a European (LLLP) learning partnership about ethical competences. Ethics is one of the courses all students take in the school of social work, so I felt we could benefit from sharing views and focussing on this issue in a European project with partners from various countries.
In our first meeting in Vilnius (see my earlier blog post) we identified 20 ethical values, here’s a visualisation of them, thanks to wordle.

All these have now been worked out in a joint format, a framework identifying aspects like knowledge, skills, attitudes, potential instruments, pedagogical issues etc. Following that, at the 2nd project meeting in Palermo we tried to come to a common understanding of all these issues. However, all the steps we've taken so far have still been very much theoretically oriented and unfortunately, much of the meeting time was spent on presenting theoretical foundations of ethical values and competences and ways of categorising them.
The real challenge will be to put it all into practice by designing and implementing appropriate tools to use in educational settings. This will be the focus of our 3rd meeting in Romania in November. We expect to share experiences in the educational/pedagogical approach and discuss how each partner, in their own context, applied a diversity of instruments for a limited number of the identified ethical values. Let's hope that this upcoming meeting will have a more interactive working mode than the one I've just come back from. It's to a great extent the European project meetings that are favourable to exchanges, discussions and dialogue and where participants in a learning partnership can familiarise themselves with a wide variety of European views in a way that is unparallelled.

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This blog post reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained herein.

LEVEL5, at a glance

In the beautiful and peaceful setting of Alden Biesen castle, Belgium, a European conference took place on the validation of informal learning. It was announced as a practical and active conference bringing together practitioners and educational experts from a variety of European countries. And indeed, after some keynotes and an overview of some informal learning projects, the afternoon was fully dedicated to getting to grips with the LEVEL5 system, an instrument meant to validate informal or non-formal learning.
Just 2 weeks prior to this meeting I had attended a seminar session where a speaker had pressed an urgent message on his audience: to sustain good practices it's of vital importance to demonstrate to your funders or sponsors that the projects you have run have been worthwhile, in the sense that the beneficiaries can be shown to have made progress in one way or another. And exactly that had in the past often proved to be a bottleneck. At the end of a project many people show enthusiasm , new innovative approaches are tried out and tested to the satisfaction of many, but in the end, as the projects have been funded with temporary money, good practices in the social domain die a slow death as the impact is not or inadequately demonstrated via a survey, research or any other validating tool to assess success.
LEVEL5 is a welcome development, in that it could substantiate exactly that: this approach can establish competence development of (adult) learners in informal and non formal learning contexts.

Learning results can be displayed and (via a 3-dimensional web-based cube) visualised in 3 different dimensions, namely cognitive, activity related and affective competences (sometimes referred to as Head, Hand and Heart).
Two dimensional charts are also available to display the learning results which were recorded after a learning project. This truly appears to be a promising development from which many adult learners and adult learning providers may benefit.
More detailed information about LEVEL5, including some screenshots of the software, is available via the REVEAL community website.