Intercultural skills cannot be improvised-"Zelda"

In the last forty years, Europe has become a multicultural, multilingual, and multireligious society. Immigration phenomena cannot be considered an emergency anymore. As European citizens, we need to develop an intercultural attitude to be able to manage the cultural differences that increasingly characterize schools, job places, social services, and public spaces.

Intercultural skills cannot be improvised: they need specific training and a self-reflective attitude, which can be learned.

 

We put Margalit Cohen-Emerique's intercultural training approach in the center of our new Erasmus+project. Meet Zelda!

 

In this project, we propose:

 

- fostering intercultural competences in different target groups by disseminating the MCE innovative intercultural approach thanks to training courses and multiplier events;

- developing an intercultural approach in public and private life that can help to fight against discrimination, racism, and extremism in schools, social services, public spaces, and so on;

- developing, through the intellectual outputs and the joint staff training, a standardized competences framework, a course curriculum for intercultural training, original methods, and new toolkits starting from Cohen-Emerique’s approach.

 

Cohen Emerique’s intercultural approach:

 

Cohen-Emerique noticed that migrants and professionals working with migrants often go through misunderstandings, cultural shocks and violent conflicts because of the different cultural frameworks and scale of values they act. When they live these cultural shocks, they fell vulnerable, angry, disoriented and their personal and professional skills are nearly paralyzed by these negative feelings.

Instead of breaking off dialogue and relationship, Cohen-Emerique invites trainers, educators,

volunteers and migrants to live cultural shocks as an opportunity to become aware of everyone’s

cultural points of view, to share them by using words in order to promote dialogue and mutual understanding.

 

Target groups:

 

We address to intercultural trainers working in the social, education and health sectors, to professional educators working in social services, child protective services, in the juvenile justice

field and in recreational public spaces, adult teachers working with migrants both in formal and non-conventional schooling contexts, migrant parents, young migrants and volunteers working with immigrates in food stations, centres for first assistance and family clinics.

 

Partners:

 

Ruah (Italy) is a cooperative that aims at promoting social inclusion and an intercultural approach by offering intercultural training, language courses and welcoming first centers activities for refugees.

Artemisszio (Hungary) is an independent private non-profit organization that encourages continuous interaction between culturally, ethnically and socially diverse groups. They propose intercultural training based on the MCE approach and innovative methodologies such as forum theatre.

CBAI (Belgium) is an association active in the fields of intercultural training, welcoming first-comers in the Brussels- Capital Region and supporting migrants associations.

CESIE (Italy) is a European Centre of Studies that aims at stimulating change in educational, cultural and economic spheres. They have been working with the MCE cultural shocks methods in different domains (i.e.: diversity management in healthcare).

Elan Interculturel (France) is an organization that develops new methods to facilitate

intercultural communication, collaboration and adaptation; the organization’s staff has been directly trained by Margalit Cohen Emerique.

Diesis (Belgium) is a European Research and Development Service for Social Economy which covers more than 10 EU countries through major national federations and national support networks.