DESCRIPTION
The project aims to create a digital repository that captures real-life testimonies from people belonging to minority groups and to familiarizes students and educators with interdisciplinary methodology and ethnographic participatory approaches. Placing the voices and biographies of migrant/refugee students and teachers on the forefront of education the platform will offer the visitors diverse learning pathways by assembling and combining research-based resources (text, sound, exercise, experiment, video etc.) thus blending multiple perspectives. A partnership of four bodies (3 European universities and 1 technological collective) from Greece, Bulgaria and France will employ a participatory research approach and develop a digital repository for multimodal education based on ethnographic fieldwork and video documentation of testimonies from the context of migrant, refugee and minority communities.
PROJECT AIMS
The motivation for the implementation of this project came from the lack of research-based multimodal material for training teachers who work with minority and moving populations, especially in the region of southeastern Europe. This lack of a systematic collection, curation and educational use of ethnographic material that deals with the education of minority and moving populations in the region (and especially in Greece as a point of entry into the European continent) has created insufficient knowledge and limited practices for understanding and for teaching students who carry this background. Especially with the recent proliferation of distance education methods and the augmented use of multimodal material, the development of high-quality research-based training material is more urgent than ever.
The VOLARE project has the following main objectives:
- To create an international consortium of Higher Education Institutions (HEI) and non-academic partners with the primary aim of creating a research-based repository for intercultural education
- To collect, develop and refine innovative practices, innovative school initiatives and experimental methodologies about MRM education
- To collect fieldwork ethnographic material about the relationship between displacement and education in southern Europe
- To create and deliver a set of resources to be curated in a dynamic digital repository that will boost the research and teaching capacities of the institutions involved as well as other academic and non-academic beneficiaries
- To work towards the creation of inclusive and culturally sensitive digital platforms for educational technologies that actively support diversity
- To enhance the digital literacies of teachers, academics and students in the field of intercultural education
- To support capacity building of the participating organizations transnationally in the area of MRM education and digital education and training
The key aim of the project includes the collection of ethnographic, archival and instructional material about minority, migrant and refugee education and its curation in an open-access digital repository that illuminates the people’s diverse testimonies and how they can become a source of knowledge and a basis for contemporary educational methodologies. This points to the orientation of building inclusive higher education systems and supporting methodologies of innovative learning and teaching that are so missing in southern Europe. As a secondary objective, it cultivates considerable digital capabilities for university students, academics as well as teachers of formal education and other interested parties. What is more, the polylingual character of the collected material will act as a bridge between diverse experiences of displacement and social stigma. As a long-term goal VOLARE supports the integration of migrants and displaced persons:
- on the level of representation, as it makes their experiences credible and heard and widens the knowledge base about them;
- on the level of formal education, as it helps teachers better understand their needs and expectations,
- on a societal level, as it places emphasis in teaching strategies that valorize difference and promote equity and social justice in secondary and higher education, thus promoting civic-competences in education.