On February 21-22, 2019, university teachers from 3 universities with a pedagogical profile from the republic – Moldova State University, “Alecu Russo” University of Balti and Comrat State University – participated in the first workshop under the project, approaching the basic principles in developing the curriculum for the university course of intercultural education.

The necessity of this starting workshop was dictated by the need to bring to the common denominator the trainees – future authors of curricular normative acts and to establish a platform for the further actions.

According to the facilitator of the workshop, PhD. Tatiana CARTALEANU, the unannounced motto of the activity was: “Show your values; present your experience; spot your gaps! “, the explicit objectives being: to form a community of teachers who will collaborate in building a common product; analyzing the intercultural competence of the pupil / student / teacher and reporting it to the cultural competence; defining an overview of the teacher’s professional development training path; identifying the place that the intercultural competence occupies in the outcomes of teacher training (versus the long-awaited “National Qualifications Framework”); assimilation of intercultural competence training- development strategies; a listing of any possible contents in a core curriculum of intercultural education.

We find that all the objectives and the planned activities have been achieved and that the trainees have always come out with their own experiences and questions on the agenda. The trainer has been concerned with proceedings and methods for training professional skills and has chosen appropriate cases that can cause and generate discussions and we can state that work has been done in depth. The main form of design and conduct of the workshop was the ERRE framework, being reserved sufficient space and time for debates, metacognition, immediate application and transfer to the disciplines that the participants teach. The group has demonstrated tolerance, loyalty and collegiality, the trainees being attentive and open with colleagues. At the same time, while working in groups per universities, some lack of flexibility in the design of a new product, contents and skills for a new profile specialist has been observed.

Finally, we greatly appreciate the contribution of the workshop to the development of the cultural and intercultural competences of university professors, including the formative qualitative results of the workshop, demonstrated through the updated practical knowledge of the elaboration of the university curriculum, underlining Tatiana CARTALEANU’s conclusion: “We all know everything, but we want to learn once more how is getting better”.

Viorica Goraş-Postică,
project expert