On 14-15 March 2019, during in an unusual workshop, the professors from the partner universities, which work on a modular curriculum of intercultural education for future teachers, under the project supported by the Pestalozzi Children’s Foundation in Switzerland, has approached intercultural competences both from the perspective of key competences and from the perspective of general and specific ones.

During 2 days of training, the formulation of intercultural competence has been practiced, after analyzing the possible constituents of key and general competences, researching a list of key competencies for the future of our children (soft skills) and a hierarchy of in the pre-university and university education trams.

Also, the elements that could become part of intercultural competence was analyzed: fundamental skills expressed actively; knowledge or domains of knowledge and field-specific strategies; values / attitudes / contexts of achieving the competence, discussing the opportunities for teaching the Intercultural education course in the universities involved, as well as the ways in which the respective competence can be institutionalized.

Interactive techniques have been applied in the workshop, including accessible, “exciting” texts and situations that have led to reflections and discussions, using various graphical forms of information organization, believing that through this way it’s processing is more efficient ensured.

In particular, it has been followed the awareness of the fact that each of the trainees, being a university teacher, “should be able to” visualize in perspective” the course he proposes, and its conceptualization is a proper product, homemade that cannot be industrial elaborated, cannot be provided and taking wholesale, ” says Mrs. Tatiana Cartaleanu.

We were glad to see that some trainees, less active in the first workshop, have now become much more open to communication and interrelationships. The group has generally demonstrated tolerance, loyalty and collegiality, and the result of applying final evaluation questionnaires reveals that the participants have greatly appreciated the professional competence of the trainer, signaling the strategic approach to the learning activity. Finally, many of them acknowledged that all activities were useful and have suggested for the next workshop – planning tasks to monitor independent work and seeing good practice lessons from different countries.

Viorica Goraş-Postică,
project expert