<< Objectives >>This project is about building up social relations between youth with and without a migrant background who do not feel a sense of belonging to their community, through a co-creative process to develop leisure time activities (arts (visual, literary, performing), cultural, sport, etc.). Through the activities in this project, youth will be engaged, connected, and empowered to become a more active member of their community and create sustainable, customised activities for all young people.<< Implementation >>This project involves a context analysis, workshops to build up social relations among our target groups, as well as facilitating the development of a leisure time/sport activity through a co-creative process. The whole process is facilitated, designed, and co-created by the target groups, youth, and organisations, together. Additionally, disseminating activities, primarily through digital platforms will reach a broad audience and increase the potential impact of the project.<< Results >>We expect the involved youth to have a heightened sense of belonging which leads to a greater willingness to participate and engage with their community. We also expect the level of cooperation among other target groups to have improved. Furthermore, more trust has developed between the youth and the other target groups, with increased knowledge of each other's opinions, visions, and interests. We are hoping that the activities also have a long-lasting impact due to sustainability components.

"So far, practiced educational model by universities is the so-called factory education model. Factory model school and factory model education are terms describing both a style of learning and of educational facilities. The key characteristics of factory model education are top-down management, separation from the community, emphasis on management, centralized planning, standardization, outcomes designed to meet societal needs, and efficiency in producing results. The system has been described as being ""designed to create docile subjects and factory workers"". If such an education system was valid in the past, it doesn't fit anymore today. The point is that students in the 21st century are frustrated with the factory model. They think they know better. Many researches have shown that the reasons why countless students drop out of school every day are that: a.) school is boring, and b.) school is not relevant to their lives. The biggest problem is, educational system doesn’t motivate students. Millions of students do not know any purposing of going to university, except obligation. Various studies have shown that the best results are in those activities, which are based on internal motivation. That's why our project aim is to focus on innovative methods and approaches, which is focused on internal motivation - that students learn because they want to not because they have to. And in the end that kind of methods and approaches will help lecturers and students in their future work smarter not harder. This project is great opportunity to gather all good practices, to develop new innovative methods and approaches, to create methodology material and create Professional development courses of academic staff and also already to train first lecturers. There will be systematized and summarized the best methods and approaches from European high schools, complemented by leading business companies recommendations. Since in he project is also involved Didactic material Center and Teacher Training departments from our partner organizations, it will provide professional training material development and we have already negotiated with them that the Intellectual output of the will be officially introduced in Professional development courses of academic staff. The most important project participants - experts who will develop methodology in daily life are teachers at the same time. Other participants - students, will be involved in the project thanks to lectures. They will not have mandatory action to spend time in project activities, but this will happen in natural way in their daily routine. The project timetable is subordinated to higher education regime that allows us to easily reach our target audience. The contribution of the project will be observable in significant impact on all the involved - individuals and organizations: - for the very first time there will be developed a set of innovative methods and approaches for higher education that will be officially included in teachers' life long learning courses. - this course will give access for teachers to the range of new teaching tools. Using developed set of innovative teaching methods and approaches, that kind of professional development for teachers will become as standard across all European institutions."

Including children with special educational needs (SEN) in Bhutanese regular classroom is a recent concept. With much awareness and initiatives for the inclusion of children with SEN in mainstream schools by government agencies, local civil society organizations and international organizations, there has been increase in the enrollment of children with SEN in schools every year. But given the limited professional support in the classroom and resource constraints, supporting children with SEN has been a major challenge. Studies have claimed that Bhutanese classrooms with large size (40 to 45 students in a classroom) handled by a single SEN teacher who do not have formal qualification of teaching children with SEN has posed a serious challenge in supporting the needs of the children with SEN. Further, this situation is worsened by the fact that Bhutanese classrooms do not have teacher assistants to support the children and SEN teachers. Therefore, it is asserted that the provision of teacher assistants to assist students with SEN in schools would ease the burden of under resourced teachers. In addition, the need for teacher assistants has been emphasized in Bhutan's Standard for SEN (2017), National Policy for Persons with Disabilities (2019) and other national policies alike. With these national issues and policy expectations the Royal University of Bhutan (RUB) has proposed this project in developing and implementing the first ever National Diploma programme in Teacher Assistant. This project will have implications for RUB in terms of capacity building, best practices, and industrial linkages with EU HEIs. It is also expected that with the implementation of this project, children with SEN and their parents in Bhutan are benefited, and provide employment opportunities to Bhutanese youths. All in all, this project is expected to address in attaining the the long term SDGs and the aspirations of developmental philosophy of Gross National Happiness.

"The project “Active Media Education for Disabled Youth” (AMEDY) deals with the challenges of the digital world for young people with light intellectual disabilities and the needs of the professionals that are working with this target group. Although young people with disabilities show high interest in digital technology and even use media intensively in socialisation, results show e.g. that bullying and victimisation seem to be more likely to happen to these young people. For them, it is often difficult to take advantage of the opportunities offered by digital technologies; likewise, they also need special support to cope adequately with the risks they might encounter while using them. This project therefore aims to empower vulnerable youth by enhancing their media literacy and teaching them to make use of digital devices and services in a responsible and creative way. By training professionals and their organisations, they become media literacy experts and can pass on their knowledge to the vulnerable young people. However, there is still a lack of social media knowledge and media literacy among social services and their staff in several European countries. This was also confirmed by the previous EU projects and by a small survey of professionals who participated in this project. Digital literacy (basic instrumental ICT skills, information literacy, media literacy and computational thinking) must be effectively promoted in facilities where children und youth use digital devices and the internet. Also, as European society turns more digital, social care workers today are working in a field where digital competences have become a prerequisite to ensure high quality social care work, while also focussing on closing the digital divide in European societies. To further address the issues arising from the special needs of young people with light intellectual disabilities in the digital world, the AMEDY project has focused on the following objectives: - raising awareness for the importance of active media education for young people with intellectually disability on national and European level - meeting the demand of professionals working with this young target group to enhance their practical digital literacy knowledge - involving the management level of organisations working with young people with intellectually disability to raise awareness for further vocational training of the professionals who work directly with the young target group - offering support strategies for all involved target groups (young people & their parents, professionals, management level)During the 26 month project phase, an extensive collection of interesting and supportive materials was developed to contribute to solving the problems mentioned above.The collection includes an online training for professionals working with young people with intellectual disabilities, a support strategy paper suggesting how to deal with problems in everyday media use by young people, and a collection of best practices for events and actions that raise awareness for the special needs of this young target group. In addition, the interesting methodogical approach of ""Design Thinking"" was presented as well as a guide to develop support strategies and organise awareness raising activities yourself."

This project was developed in response to recent research highlighting the importance of intercultural competencies for graduates wanting to work in Europe and the employers’ needs and what intercultural competencies and skills higher education institutions provide. The objectives of this project are to:1) Explore and analyse the gap between cross-cultural skills highlighted by the studied organisations operating in Europe and studied students’ actual and perceived cross-cultural skills;2) Develop, test and refine teaching strategies, practices, and learning materials based on the research with students and employers in order to develop students’ cross-cultural skills and align these with the requirements of the studied employers operating in Europe;3) Disseminate the outcomes of the project to learners, educators and employers across Europe through the annual open and digitally connected conferences and on open access web platforms.Five Higher Education Institutions will participate in this study: University of Worcester (Project lead-UK), London South Bank University (UK), UC Leuven-Limburg (Belgium), Halmstad University (Sweden), and Bursa Uludağ University (Turkey). The diversity of these partners and their previous experience working together and with regional business achieves the research’s cultural aspect and ensures the project’s success. The project will be conducted over a 30 month period.The first output will entail conducting surveys and interviews to final year students and employers. This will gather a minimum of 500 student survey responses, 50 student interviews, 500 employer survey responses and 50 employer interviews. The aim is to capture student perceptions of the cross-cultural competencies and skills they posses and employer perceptions on the type of cross-cultural competencies and skills needed to succeed in the workplace. This will be followed by the analysis of this data to create the first output: an open source 'Industry-Graduates Cross-cultural Competencies and Skills Report’ which will highlight the intercultural skills needs. A digitally connected conference will be organised at each partner institution at the completion of the report to share the findings of this first output.The second output will entail the development of cross-cultural case studies and learning materials to form the basis of the second output: an open source ‘Cross-cultural Competencies and Skills Development Toolkit’. This Toolkit will contain 20 case studies (10 written, 5 video and 5 narrative video scribe) based in the research conducted. In addition, teaching material will be developed including a company profile, discussion questions and case study module answers. In developing this toolkit, feedback from students, educators and employers will be sought in the form of a feedback questionnaire and interviews. A digitally connected conference will be organised at each partner institution at the completion of the report to share the findings of this first output.The third output will involve revising the second output based on the feedback received and proceed to develop the third output: an open source ‘Cross-cultural Competencies and Skills Development Training Manual’. A digitally connected conference will be organised at each partner institution at the completion of the report to share the findings of this first output.The project will impact the higher education students participating in the modules which use the project outputs. Because of their participation in the different innovative delivery and learning methods, students’ cross-cultural competencies will be improved. The participating business organisations and academic institutions will develop stronger links with partner institutions and academic knowledge and skills that can be implemented in other parts of the institutions, creating a culture of international collaboration and focus on knowledge development and dissemination. The participating educators from these organisations will benefit from greater ability to collaborate internationally in an integrated series of activities, research and output. The participating employers will benefit from increased networks and collaboration with the institutions producing the next generation of graduate employees. They will appreciate a direct line of communication with these institutions and be able to share their needs and views and visions for the direction of future employability. Finally, this project has a positive impact on the wider local and regional societies in the four countries and the EU as a whole, as it enables the free and wide dissemination of the outputs to all students, employers, educators, higher education and governing institutions. The focus in developing cross-cultural competencies and skills translates to higher mobility of individuals who are better equipped to understand and interact with each other in an ever closer Union.