Véronique Simon participated in Erasmus+ ”Thematic seminar for ongoing projects” in Bergen 21-22 november 2019. The seminar was coordinated by Diku – Norwegian Agency for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education – NO01
The theme was “Teacher education and international collaboration”. Here is a description of the aims for this seminar: “This TCA will address and monitor on-going Erasmus+ strategic partnership projects coordinated by initial teacher education (ITE) institutions which aim to strengthen the teaching profession through international collaboration. The overall idea of this seminar is to explore how teacher education institutions can engage in close discussions and interactions with each other, schools and other stakeholder, both nationally and internationally, to promote the status and quality of teachers.
It is the duty of the teacher education providers to give teachers a good grounding as they set out to practice their profession. The quality of teacher education does not, however, only rely on the efforts made by the teacher educators, but also on quality contributions from kindergartens and schools that provide supervised professional training for student teachers and where they will later take up employment. A central theme of the seminar will be to discuss how the professionalism of teachers and teacher educators could benefit from developing more collaborative practices and a collaborative culture, and how to benefit from engaging in networks, professional learning communities and different kinds of partnerships. The seminar also invites the participants to identify the benefits and added value of engaging in international professional learning communities through Erasmus+ strategic partnerships. An underlying theme/concern of the TCA is that internationalization of teacher education remains rare in most countries, and this is also why we want to invite this group in particular to discuss and learn from their projects to identify and showcase promising practice.”
This seminar was a great opportunity for showcasing KINDINMI and getting feedback from colleagues from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden who were also presenting their projects, some over, some still going on. A mixture of lectures, workshops and discussions resulted in inspiration for the future work and European projects on the topic. Both KA1 (school) and KA2 (higher education) projects were present, and we were given the opportunity to reflect about projects were both sectors would be participating, were theory and practice meet. As for KINDINMI, the potential for sustainable, emotional impact through the project was greatly appreciated, as well as the use of multimodality in the Heartspace sharing book, and the postcard with QR code as means for dissemination.