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.)

INVEST in Your Volunteers

That has become the title of a digital booklet that five European partners (from Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the UK) have been working on during the two-year run of the INVEST project. 
In a nutshell, the booklet outlines how to encourage and empower volunteers by creating special learning opportunities for them.
The focus of our European Grundtvig project was learning through volunteering. The main objective was to identify and apply different methods and tools for facilitating learning opportunities for volunteers and share the experiments and experiences among the wider European community involved in volunteering.
The rationale behind the booklet is: volunteers can be empowered by raising their awareness of the many competences and skills they are acquiring during their voluntary activities and by supporting them in identifying these skills as well as by providing other learning opportunities to them, such as workshops.
In order to support and encourage volunteers in their development 25 tools have been described and displayed in the booklet via a format. Among these there are also sample portfolios, as they provide unique opportunities to stimulate volunteers to reflect on their broad experiences and achievements and in this way get to grips with assessing their own capabilities, increasing their quality of life, connecting this to their ambitions and their level of commitment to learning from volunteering.
The booklet includes five chapters and four appendices with additional resources.

Here's it is :

Would you like to get a flavour of the project and see its many participants in action, why not have a look at this set of pictures on flickr.com  ?



Training Course in Palermo, day 2

The story of the training course in Palermo continues, from their base in the convent of San Giovanni Battista di Baida.
By guest blogger Alex Adriana:

Baida - getting to know the topic

So, we started the second day with one of the games we did on the first day. The facebook game. The people who didn’t have their picture drawn yet, got it today. The other energizer was massaging each other in a big circle. I noticed that it’s very common to touch each other in a lot of cultures. Sometimes I’m okay with that but other times it makes me a bit uncomfortable though.

Today was about the homo eroticus (his-story). It was about how many historical happenings are written from a male perspective and females are nowhere to be found. So, we talked a lot more about the women in this story. There was an assigment and we had to write down a few fictional characters (from fairy tales and myths) and divide them into three groups: virgin woman, fertile (sexually active) woman and the old woman. It was very funny and nice to see that many of the Slavic fairy tales are the same as the ones I know from Dutch culture.

After the coffee break we did a very nice energizer, called Mazinga! It’s very simple, yet very powerful. And we continued with the lecture, when our lecturer said something very inspiring I think: "Every  woman is a nun, even when she shows her nipples". To me it means there is nothing about a human (male nor female) body to sexualize. Everyone’s body is sacred.

After lunch we had time to prepare our presentation, but since the internet wasn’t working and we had other technical difficulties we couldn’t finish our powerpoint. We ended up making a poster, which was also very nice. But, due to lack of time we weren’t able to present this day, so it moved to the other day.

After dinner we had the opportunity to show the organisation we represent. In our case that’s our school, as well as the internship me and Ruby (one of my classmates) are doing. There were many other organisations, some of which I’m really interested in. For example, some of them work with the same method, but others are in a totally different field of work. In the late evening we had a party on the rooftop of the monastery, which has an amazingly beautiful view. I talked with a lot of nice people and I got to know some people a bit better.

Day 2 was a very nice day, but I was also a bit sleepy and I felt like the lectures were a bit too long here and there. But the people here are very, very nice!

A Training Course in Palermo, Sicily

This week three students from the CMV study programme went to Sicily for a training course under the title of Let's Bridge The Gap (or: LBTG for short). The programme was hosted and organised by CESIE, an international partner of our school of social work, under the Youth in Action programme which is funded by the EU.
One of the students was asked to act as guest blogger here.
Here's what Alex Adriana has written on her own blog, which was copied here:

Baida – getting to know each other

by ladyalexx

So, the first day here in Baida started off with a groupbuilding activity called Mission Impossible. We had to do all sorts of things within our group but we had limited time. We had to take the funniest group picture, interview 5 people about what identity means to them, find out the price of coca cola, a bus ticket and chocolate in different countries. We had to list 35 countries, sing happy birthday in as many languages as possible, make up a story of a few certain words and we had to make a sixties commercial for young people. After this we had a short break and then we wrote down our fears and expectations of this project. Not really sharing it, but putting it on post-it notes and hang them in the lecture hall. After lunch we did a game, called ‘Facebook’. We had an inner circle who were the models for the outer circle. The outer circle had to change seats every few seconds so everybody took part in drawing the person from the inner circle. It was very funny.

Then things really started. The concept of gender and sexuality was introduced and in pairs we had to answer questions and tell our findings to the group. I had to talk about what the difference is between sex and gender. For the rest of the day we worked on a big puzzle with all sorts of terms that can be divided into different groups. First we made the puzzle in small groups and then we made the puzzle with the whole group, so everybody could see what the level of knowledge of the group is. The exercise was also meant to have a common ground of the words we use and what they mean. 

We ended the first day with an aphrodisiac dinner where we presented our national food which is also kind of aphrodisiac. The other countries had many nice things as well. After dinner we went up to the roof with a few people and it was very nice, we socialized more than during the project I think.

In general, I really like being here. The people are very nice and open minded. All of the assignments really helped to get to know each other better and really make us a group."

Social Work Brugge visits Rotterdam with more than 100 students

A contribution in Dutch by guest blogger: Johan Bertels from Belgium

Het eerste jaar Sociaal Werk uit Brugge trok van 6 tot 8 mei naar de Hogeschool Rotterdam om er samen met Nederlandse studenten te werken rond Inter Cultural Learning (ICL).  Dit aan de hand van interactieve en ervaringsgerichte  Non Formal Education Methoden.  Zij werden vergezeld door 5 docenten en een collega van de University of South Wales (UK) .  Vlaamse en Nederlandse studenten die daarvoor kozen, konden de module dan ook in het Engels volgen.   De groep werd ook vergezeld door een onderzoeker  die participerend observeerde.  Daarnaast werden ook alle studenten bevraagd over hun ICL ervaring, dit in het kader van het onderzoek “Visies, concepten en drempels in het intercultureel leren” van het Thucydides fonds.

De opleiding Sociaal Werk koos voor Rotterdam als locatie om het ICL verhaal te brengen omwille van de meerwaarde van de grote diversiteit in de stad en aan de Hogeschool.  Voor toekomstige sociaal werkers is het zeer belangrijk om met diversiteit te kunnen omgaan.  Op de laatste dag namen de Nederlandse studenten de HOWEST studenten in kleine groepjes met het openbaar vervoer mee naar de multiculturele wijken en buurten.   Ook het verblijf in Maritime hotel – het vroegere zeemanshuis – droeg bij tot de ontmoeting met andere culturen.   Met deze  “massa-mobiliteit” proeven de eerste jaars voor het eerst van een korte, maar intense internationale ervaring.  De gemeenschappelijke taal zou hierbij een drempelverlagend effect moeten hebben, maar toch bleken we vaak een “anders soort”  Nederlands  te spreken, wat regelmatig tot grappige  misverstanden aanleiding gaf.