The Graduate School of Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) hosted the second face-to-face meeting of the PROFIC (Professional Development of Intercultural Competence in Higher Education Institutions) project, in which the Union of Latin American and Caribbean Universities (UDUAL) participates. , in addition to a renowned group of Latin American and European universities.
The objective of the project is to generate open and adaptable educational resources that foster the development of intercultural skills in students. The results of the PROFIC will be a holistic and integrated set of tools and supporting documents (ToolKit) for the professional development of academics, administrative staff and university students.
Maria Yarosh, a researcher at the University of the Church of Deusto, Spain, presented the results of the reference study that UDUAL applied to its affiliates, with the aim of knowing the current state of activities to strengthen interculturality, university policies of encouragement or other affirmative action. Results indicated new emerging areas in the subject, lack of support for staff development, and differing viewpoints between students and staff. Dane Lukic and Sara Cella, a researcher at the Universitá degli Studi Guglielmo Marconi, also participated in this stage. The results will soon be on the website www.profic.org.
Regarding the participation of UDUAL in this project co-financed by the European Commission, the university network will provide, through a communication and dissemination strategy, the relational capital that the project requires to be implanted in the largest number of Institutions of Latin American Higher Education (IES). In a first stage, UDUAL developed the project site and generated the social networks Facebook and Twitter, platforms that will house editorial and multimedia content that will contribute to the epistemology of intercultural competence.
In the symposium “Cross-border education: Intercultural, international and inclusion perspectives”, which was held within the framework of the PROFIC meeting, the discussion was opened to a more heterogeneous audience and the range of projects related to the internationalization of the plan was shown. of studies and with the intercultural competence (EQUiiP and National Teaching Fellow Award) that GCU offers its students.
The meeting was held on October 10 and 11 at the London campus of GCU and was attended by the universities of the Church of Deusto (Spain), degli Studi Guglielmo Marconi (Italy), Guadalajara-Campus Lagos ( Mexico), Veracruzana (Mexico), Don Bosco (El Salvador), Tecnológica de El Salvador, as well as the Argentine national universities of La Plata, Lanús and Córdoba.
