DIVERSITY

Including Migrants through Organisational Development and Programme Planning in Adult Education

Assessing and validating the DIVERSITY modularised training

DIVERSITY – Including Migrants through Organisational Development and Programme Planning in Adult Education is a 30-months international project co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Commission.

It involves a Consortium of 7 Partners from 6 countries, i.e. Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Ireland; its objectives consist in:

• Accompany the EU Adult Education system in the mentality shift from focusing on migrants as very specific target groups and preparing them for integration into the society.
• Raising awareness for migration related diversity, its challenges, and its opportunities (referring to cultural and pedagogical but equally to economic aspects) with managers and planners in AE as well as policy makers.
• Equipping managers and planners with the skills needed to open AE providers to migrants as a regular target group.

To do so, during proposal Partners foreseen 4 macro intellectual outputs conceived as follows:

1. An in-depth mapping activity on Diversity-informed dynamics and operational practices within the organisational dimension of Adult Education Providers: a cross-national assessment that involved both primary and secondary resources (via interview and focus groups) and resulted in a very comprehensive executive report collecting relevant trends, overall dynamics and success studies on effective education and training practices for migrants in select European countries.

• The development of a modularised training curriculum that enables managers and planners in adult education organisations to re-focus both their organisational structures and their course programmes to recognise and include migrants as a regular target group of their educational activities. The curriculum is structured around two major categories, organisational structure and programme planning, and each module is fully EQF-compliant aiming at learning outcomes on level three to four. The modules are to be “mixed and matched”; each module might be conceived as a stand-alone training unit but can also be combined with any other module, which maximises adjustment to the individual needs of managers/planners and their organisation. In terms of structure, each module consists of:
  • Short summary of the module.
  • Brief description of the knowledge to be acquired.
  • Brief description of the skills to be acquired.
  • Brief description of the personal abilities (responsibility and autonomy) to be acquired.

• Testing and Validation of the modularised training curriculum with 100 target groups from the represented countries (including staff of the participating organisations, as well, since they are crucial for rooting the staff training in the partner organisation and therefore for a sustainable long-term continuation of the trainings). The project is currently in this exact phase of development – under the precious guidance of the Greek partner HAEA, the Consortium agreed on the outline of the underlying tasks in terms of general timeline and distribution of the work. Partners proposed and discussed what are for them the most suitable means of delivery and the overall methodology they will rely on to conclude such delicate activity.

• Finally, the last months of the Project’s lifecycle will be dedicated to the development, review, publication and mainstreaming of the so defined “Policy Recommendations”; a collection of findings, insights and experiences from the DIVERSITY project aimed to:
  • inform evidence-based policy formulation.
  • provide policy recommendations.
  • identify actionable measures for stakeholders.

Standing from an evidence-based perspective, the paper represents a sort of operational memory of the project and will be used to expose where policy making, policy change or policy deregulation can support the transformation of adult education providers towards organisations open for migration diversity.

All deliverables are available here: https://www.aewb-nds.de/themen/eu-programme/diversity/