COHEHRE revisited

Let's reassess, one year on !
With that motto in mind I took off for Budapest to participate in the Cohehre conference on Health and Social Care Perspectives for a Sustainable Future, which included the subthemes of: 
• Innovative and sustainable teaching for health and social care education 
• Global partnerships for health and social care education 
• New challenges in health and social care services 
• Equity in health and social care. 
About a year earlier I wrote in my blog here that for our school of social work the Cohehre network was probably not such an interesting option to invest in. Well, this year's edition of the conference turned me around.
I was pleasantly surprised by more social care & social work perspectives and input. Clearly, seeds had been sown and efforts had been made to pay more attention to social practices and studies. 
This year interprofessional learning (IPL), a term I picked up during the conference, was highlighted , especially through the keynote speaker on day 1, Blair Stevenson. Stimulating us to think about innovations in education, his main message was that there's been hardly anything new under the sun in education, except for cooperating in multidisciplinary teams of students on new ideas and products. He asked the audience to imagine what it would be like to bring together students from health and social work and have them collaborating on a prototype together with business and graphical design students. In posing this question he set the scene for the conference for me. The Cohehre network can indeed be considered a powerful catalyst in European interprofessional training for intervention practices and reflection. And while attending different workshops and sessions scattered across the following two days that impression stuck with me. Cohehre is definitely not a network for people with a silo mentality.
Meanwhile, students from health care and social work course programmes had already been working intensively on the theme of Diversity and Inclusion.  Interestingly, they  applied the method of "city exploration", a wonderful "learning-by-doing" strategy on which I wrote in an earlier blog post here. 
On the last day they were to share their findings and present their joint work to all the conference delegates, among them their own lecturers. From their enthusiastic presentations it was obvious that lots had been learned in a week's time and that the experience had fostered their interprofessional and intercultural understanding. 
On another positive note, the Cohehre network appears to be steadily evolving, not only in numbers, but also by producing a rich and growing menu of opportunities for students and staff alike. Additionally, the network is also involved in new Erasmus + projects, adding knowledge and expertise to the network.

Riding back on the bus to the airport, I concluded that I was not disappointed, using typically British understatement. The conference programme, the relaxing atmosphere of Budapest and all of our hosts at Semmelweis University, who had shown us what Hungarian hospitality was like, substantially added to the success of the conference.

How to organise stimulating study visits abroad

Recently a blog on the URBACT site gave away the secrets to do just that. From the many European projects that they have run, thematic pole manager Ivan Tosics drew up a blog post to inspire others. Creating opportunities to interact with each other and the hosts, involving all participants, stimulating discussions and initiatives: these are just some of the tips.

Study visits come in all shapes and sizes, with most visits lasting 3 to 5 days and with groups that vary in size from 10 to 15 to 25 people. Many study visits (or study trips or study tours for that matter) amount to a factfinding mission, but it can be so much more than that.

International study visits broaden our horizons, challenge our understanding of ourselves, and help us understand those whose cultures are different from our own. As such they are an invaluable tool in internationalisation. Often visitors prepare themselves by researching the topic of interest in their own country and reviewing their own practice before the actual visit takes place.

Ideally these study visits consist of three components, namely academic, cultural and social exchange. Here are some of the objectives of the majority of study visits: to learn on common themes of interest, to develop mutual understanding, to provide opportunity to reflect and discuss (innovative) practices elsewhere and/or to provide opportunities for networking.
For students' learning the aim is often to compare and to contrast (and sometimes to benchmark). 

A familiar approach to attain these goals is to have site visits to NGOs and other organisations and / or to provide a mixture of expert inputs and discussion.

With the following tips you can take the design and the organisation of a study visit to the next level and provide a positive, enriching and lasting experience.

Here are the 6 "golden nuggets" that are listed in the blog post that was mentioned above:

1. Increase Innovation Potential With Unusual Circumstances

2. Involve Participants In Collective, Playful Actions

3. Organise Dynamic Presentations Of Interesting Practices

4. Ask Partners To Identify Innovative Small Case Practices

5. Make Space For Two-way Knowledge Transfer With The Hosts Of Study Visits

6. Make Room For Micro-consulting: ask international visitors to act as experts, giving advice on questions of interests to the hosts

Especially, this last tip is definitely an interesting one from an international perspective. For it requires visitors to put themselves in the shoes of the hosts and to relate the topics to the contexts they are familiar with at home. This thinking exercise is bound to produce some incredibly creative ideas that can inspire the hosts to regard the issue at hand in another light and harvest multiple perspectives and solutions from a diverse audience. 

Elsewhere on this blog City as Text was mentioned as an innovative method to uncover and discover urban areas off the beaten track in a surprising manner. The CaT pedagogy emphasizes the strength of experiential or active learning by inviting  participants to "read a city as a text" by having a walkabout through urban districts and debriefing sessions to follow up. This CaT method incorporates a number of these golden nuggets turning a study visit into a successful and stimulating experience. 

An American adventure in Rotterdam, preceding the H C 2013

The Honours Conference on October 3 and 4 was a great experience: that's the general comment from all who attended this get-together of honours students and honours lecturers. A one-off new event. New, that is to say : new at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.

Just by browsing / reading the Live Magazine below one gets a fairly good impression of what went on and how inspiring the event was. One thing is for sure: a missed opportunity for those who did not attend, such as myself.

Preceding the conference, there was a masterclass on October 2nd that was undoubtedly just as inspiring as the conference itself. It was announced as ROTTERDAM CITY AS TEXT™ - an American adventure in Rotterdam, the very first of its kind in the Netherlands.

Probably best described as a pedagogy that emphasizes the strength of experiental or active learning, the participants were invited to "read Rotterdam as a text" by having a walkabout through Rotterdam districts. Having studied the materials underpinning this approach, all of us ventured into the Afrikaanderplein market and later into specific inner district areas to explore and attempt to map the city areas as they came across at that particular moment in time: looking at Rotterdam with fresh eyes, observing and defining our own maps in order to share afterwards what we had discovered.

Apart from it being a fun experience to undergo, it was the collaborative and integrated approach that was fascinating: participants from diverse backgrounds shared their interpretations and perspectives, offering alternative explanations. In the debriefing sessions the participants' views came together and by reflecting on them there were many surprising insights. My overall impression was that for each and everyone who attended this event it had been a personally enriching experience. The masterclass was in the capable hands of two American professors: Dr. Bernice Braid and Dr. Sara Quay.
In case this has whetted your appetite, a succinct description of the City as Text pedagogy can be found here.

For international students coming to Rotterdam for a semester, this active learning experience could be just the kind of kick off  for any or all of the exchange or course programmes. It will engage students in a site specific experiential voyage of discovery that fosters critical inquiry and at the same time allows students to learn across many disciplines ! An advantage that they will benefit from for the rest of their lives.

As Umberto Eco puts it: The world is a book that demands to be read like a book.

(Pictures will be added at a later stage.)