On May 19, at the PRO DIDACTICA Educational Center, a group of 18 inspectors and teachers from Edineţ, Soroca, Ungheni, Cimişlia and Cahul districts were professionally qualified to apply a set of intercultural competency assessment tools, developed by trainers: Tatiana CARTALEANU, Olga COSOVAN, Angela GRAMA-TOMIȚA, Rodica SOLOVEI, Rima BEZEDE and Viorica GORAȘ-POSTICĂ.

After being trained a month ago by the above-named trainers, the teachers involved organized at least one promotional activity for the instruments and optional discipline Intercultural education, during April-May, at raion level. At the follow-up meeting they presented the project and conclusions on its outcomes. Those who teach in schoos also did one or several hours of conducting activity or an hour in the subject they were teaching, applying some of the tools in the book to provide some recommendations for optimizing the toolkit. Also, these tools have been promoted in the institution so that other colleagues can select and apply them as an experiment when needed, but also adapt them to specific learning contexts and children’s potential.

The youth centers in the five districts, which delegated the participants to the seminar, in cooperation with the National Youth Council of Moldova, have previously distributed to all institutions in the rayon auxiliary the Intercultural Competence and now it monitors how it is used in schools. The novelty and usefulness of the evaluation tools was appreciated by practitioners, including by clarifying the concept of intercultural competence, through its various evaluation strategies: the docimological test and the questionnaire; Products and grids; Graphic resources; Case study; The project, as a tool for developing and evaluating intercultural competence; How to apply the game in the assessment of intercultural competence, but also the trip as an original tool for assessing intercultural competence. By the end of the year, the toolkit will be modified and improved, according to school feed-back, and will later be published to be accessible to the general public.

We hope that, in the next  school year of, more children and teachers will choose from the list of optional subjects Intercultural Education, which is very necessary in our socio-cultural context, but also in the vast majority of countries of the world, but which is well provided with didactic material, especially thanks to the involvement of NGOs in international projects.

Viorica GORAȘ-POSTICĂ, trainer