Conference Agenda

Against the backdrop of the erosion of foundational democratic values as well as increasing societal polarization and extremism, teachers are given an important role in enhancing the democratic competences of students. Due to the passing of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) seven years ago (UN, 2016), this perspective has gained even more importance – now also in a global dimension: with regard to SDG 4.7, education shall “ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development” (UN, 2021). In a selection of European countries, this perspective meanwhile has been included into the national curricula, so teachers have to be qualified to meet this perspective in their educational work.

The interpretation of global citizenship varies largely among practitioners as well as researchers). Among the different interpretations: open global citizenship that emphasizes the interdependency in the global world and the possibilities it offers for cultural diversity; moral global citizenship based on moral categories like equality and human rights, that recognises responsibility for the global as a whole; social political global citizenship aimed at changing political power relations towards more equality and in the appreciation of cultural diversity (Veugelers 2011). A well-known categorization of global citizenship education (GCED) relates to the difference between soft and critical GCED (Andreotti 2006; 2016). Researchers warn that education needs to take into account issues of power, culture and economics, as a tool to understand and further develop ideas about GCED. As such, preparing teachers to facilitate GCED requires engaging with socially and politically loaded subjects globally. Nevertheless, the literature notes that teachers refrain from emphasizing the socio-political context while focusing on the moral aspect (Veugelers 2011). In order to assist teachers in overcoming their reluctance, “the pedagogical and didactical approaches should focus on dialogue; time and space must be devoted to conversations with students about the global world that surrounds them, to jointly reflect on it, and to explore the bigger framework. Paying attention to the personal signification process of every individual is necessary. Gaining knowledge, explorative thinking and acting, and development of attitudes, these all deserve attention” (Veugelers 2011:482). Through our research focusing on professionalization processes in the course of international student-teachers’ dialogues, we expect to contribute to the incipient literature on the acquisition of professional global competencies of teachers (cf. Ortloff et al., 2015; Bergmüller et al., 2021; Vare et al., 2019).

The University of the West of Scotland’s School of Education & Social Sciences currently delivers a full-time Master of Education postgraduate taught degree at London campus, titled MEd Education Studies, with bracketed specialisms in Inclusion, Leadership, and Early Years Pedagogy. The degree has three intakes per year; one per term.

In the current 22/23 session, the cohort size is above 150. While these recruitment figures represent a significant success for the University, the School has identified challenges with the student experience and academic design of the programme that it proposes to address through a redesign of the programme. The programme largely resembles the part-time MEd delivered from our Scottish campuses, and therefore responds to the priorities and imperatives around Scottish teacher education. The London MEd is catering to a global cohort of educators rather than contributing to Scottish teacher educator development, so the focus of the London programme should be better directed to the priorities of the distinctive student cohort on London campus. Many graduates choose to stay in the UK and would thus benefit from a programme with a broader European context; however, with a focus on intercultural perspectives, students who choose to return to their home countries will have had the opportunity to learn how different types of pedagogy and practice can be applied to their context.

The London MEd attracts a global cohort of scholars, all of whom are international students from East Asian, Southeast Asian, and African countries. This classroom diversity should be a huge strength, but the programme as it is currently designed does not make a feature of this. Through a commitment to social justice and inclusion principles, the redesigned MEd programme aims to include the diverse experiences of the international cohort into the teaching, learning, and research contexts. All courses will be designed through a critical intercultural lens that allows for the discussion and research of diverse perspectives around issues of education.

The London MEd team have undertaken extensive consultation with current and past students and community partners to ensure the redesigned programme addresses the priorities of its key participants. We have drawn on the diverse range of expertise to inform the proposed programme redesign. Underpinning the entire process has been a detailed engagement with the UWS Curriculum Framework. The resulting programme is a hybrid focus with some on-class modules with online content, as well as fully online modules. The process has highlighted the need for more authentic assessment, with less emphasis on written essays. In addition, seminars have been designed to be more engaging and relevant for our diverse cohorts. We are also offering an alternative to the traditional dissertation so that students can draw on their experience as educators and create proposals for teaching practice and pedagogy that reflect the social justice and inclusive principles embedded in the programme. Finally, we have been developing relationships with external social justice organisations around London to offer students a chance to learn about the history of their communities in and around London and to potentially engage in research projects. We believe that this personal connection to their culture will help further their inclusive education practice.

With over 600,000 non-EU students undertaking postgraduate degrees in the UK, it will be vital for universities to understand the intersection of identities of international students and provide evidence-based opportunities to enhance their practice in relation to their own context, rather than solely focusing on the UK context. Through our example of redesigning a programme to better serve culturally diverse students, we hope to share our successes and challenges with other universities engaging in similar work.

Stories in mainstream media are important because they shape ideas about different cultures (Adichie, 2009; Gatson and Reid, 2012). The ways in which popular culture represents people and issues both reflect and shape dominant ideologies and stereotypes (Giroux, 2004; Rossing, 2015; Wright and Wright, 2015). Popular media narratives privilege the experiences of some groups and exclude countless others. This plays a powerful role in influencing how people – from both dominant and marginalised groups – think about themselves and others. At the same time, while media can reify existing ideologies, people can also challenge them. There is no monolithic experience of engaging with cultural texts, especially ones which are shared globally across different contexts (Savage, 2013).

This paper draws on my PhD project to explore how fan podcasts act as informal sites of public pedagogy, specifically focusing on how these spaces offer opportunities for fans to express and access intersectional perspectives. I developed a research/fan podcast called Marginally Fannish where my co-participants and I used the fictional framework of popular media to co-create an alternative site of education. Popular media provided a communal context to explore our various intersections and interpretations of race and ethnicity, gender and gender diversity, social class, sexuality, religion, geographic origin, physical and mental disability, and age. Fans from diverse cultures – both marginalised and dominant in different contexts – use globally popular media as a shared language to learn about each other’s real-world experiences. By explicitly making connections between fictional worlds and real-life structures, fans explore the limitations and possibilities of both.

The feminist theory of intersectionality investigates how multiple and complex social privileges and inequalities interact with each other (Cho et al., 2013; Choo and Ferree, 2010; Collins, 2015; Davis, 2008; Jordan-Zachery, 2007; Romero, 2018). The internet has played a significant role in popularising the concept of intersectionality in non-academic spaces (Hancock, 2016; Kanai, 2019). In online spaces, people bring their diverse intersectional identities and experiences with them.

In the case of globally popular media, the diversity of fans present in online fan communities means that fans encounter ideas which they may otherwise not have considered. Fans engage in a collaborative learning process where knowledge is negotiated together and people contribute different forms of expertise (Sandlin et al., 2017; Savage, 2010). In these public pedagogical spaces, people's interactions can help challenge default social, cultural, political and educational scripts (Burdick and Sandlin, 2010).

The paper examines how conversations among fans from diverse backgrounds bring together multiple knowledges and diverse priorities. Through their analyses and critiques about how diverse cultures are represented in their favourite media, fan podcast episodes create knowledge about intersectional identities and promote alternative viewpoints about different experiences (Dittmar and Annas, 2017). This intersectional literacy can challenge and expand mainstream norms and representations, resulting in a more complex and nuanced understanding of different identities.

Fan conversations use fictional characters, themes and events as a cultural shorthand to articulate arguments about diverse identities and real-world social, political and economic structures. Parallels from popular media can draw attention to these issues in new contexts. Since popular media tend to attract fans from a diverse range of backgrounds, these elements can speak to a wide range of interests. By bringing diverse priorities and perspectives to the forefront, such conversations allow others to learn about different cultures and contexts as well as other ways of being in the world.

The paper proposes that whereas many people’s imaginations are formatively influenced by mainstream media and society, collective and public discussions in the context of fan podcasts can reshape the architecture of these imaginations.

The Corona crisis forced people all over the world to stay away and posed new challenges to the education system and higher education institutions. These are required to encourage new and creative thinking and make learning accessible in the online space. Quickly and suddenly, a transition to distance learning in a synchronous and asynchronous online environment was required while meeting the academic, social and emotional needs of the learners. This reality might accompany us in the future academic years.

Among the scientific community in the world there is an agreement that the integration of social emotional teaching (= SEL) may have a positive effect on academic, emotional and behavioral abilities in the learning space such as: self-awareness, self-control, responsible decision-making, teamwork, conflict management, communication and relationship management (Jones and Bouffard, 2012).

Also, SEL has close connection with being a responsible citizen in a democratic country based on values ​​of equality, human dignity and social justice. It also contributes to the cultivation of intercultural competence, empathy, community involvement and the ability to deal with situations of ambiguity and uncertainty (Jones & Kahn, 2017; Mahoney, Durlak & Weissberg, 2018).

To achieve this goal, five researchers, who taught in five different courses at a college of Education have developed a comprehensive curriculum on SEL.

The five courses taught by the researchers are

(1) language (B.Ed degree) - an annual seminar on discourse research;

(2) Bible (B.Ed degree) - Book of Isaiah;

(3) Language (B.Ed degree) - alternatives in language assessment;

(4) special education (master's degree) - annual seminar on multi-professional team work;

(5) Special Education (B.Ed Degree) - Annual seminar on promoting mental well-being and preventing suicide in the education system.

The researchers formulated together outlines for the various courses they were going to teach, integrating SEL skills in the various courses, creating a common professional language as part of establishing a culture that promotes SEL in the college, and research accompaniment of these actions. The planning of the courses was characterized by a flexible online learning environment that includes encouraging group interaction, openness to ideas of others, inclusion and many opportunities for collaborations.

This teaching framework allowed and encouraged the students to look inside and outside themselves and their colleagues. Studies and surveys (Johnson & Aragon, 2003; Becker et al., 2018; District RSN, 2016; Pane et al., 2015) prove that a flexible online learning environment that includes encouraging group interaction, peer assessment and feedback, helps strengthen the relationship between teachers and learners, between the learners and their colleagues, to improve the quality of learning and to provide an accurate response to the learners' needs.

The aim of this research was to examine how students experience distance learning in courses based on SEL principles in multicultural contexts.

Diversity, perceived as positive and harmless (Burner et al., 2018), is not a new phenomenon in education. Classrooms have always been quite diverse, and differences have been found among children within the same age group in readiness for learning, in their areas of interest, learning styles, experiences, background, and social status. Significant differences between children impact what they need to learn, the pace at which they need to know, the way they need to learn, and the support they need from teachers (Hjörne & Säljö, 2014). Studies have shown that classroom educators respond practically to differences and take a concrete pedagogical approach while addressing cultural minorities, adapting teaching methods, cognitive abilities, and language adjustment (Bruner & Biseth, 2016).

Distance learning: synchronous and asynchronous is one of the virtualization approaches that provides learners with an environment where basic needs are met through technology, and teachers are required to adopt new approaches and teaching methods (Burdina et al., 2019). It requires integrating technological tools, diversifying resources, and allowing a choice from a wide range of activities and flexibility in time, space, and pace (Johnson et al., 2015). In distance learning, teachers provide emotional support and security, maintain a routine, and have a sense of partnership. Creating remote interactions with students is much more challenging than classroom learning (Kundu & Bej, 2021). Moreover, teachers are required to provide opportunities for quality distance learning and to adapt the technology, pedagogy, and content to their students' needs—all planned while knowing that the ability to improvise and use body language is limited (Kundu & Bej, 2021).

Another challenge in distance learning is to leverage learning processes and create a personalized learning experience to provide children with learning tailored to their diverse needs and thus allow them to develop according to their pace, abilities, and preferences. Equally important in this type of teaching is children's autonomy and ability to choose, as both elements allow a sense of ownership of learning and better adaptation to areas of interest, increasing motivation. According to this approach, teaching is differential, refers to the learner's status, learning content, teaching methods, and the interaction between the individual and society, and allows each child to learn regardless of ability gaps (Lucas & Claxton, 2010).

In-class teachers perceive differential teaching as a very complex task, and some argue that in busy classrooms, this is an almost impossible task. Differential teaching in the 21st century should include knowledge of teaching and learning to respond to the learning needs of diverse students (Tomlinson, 2014). Previous research (Russo & Hopkins, 2019; Ridwan, Retnawati & Hadi, 2022) has found that teachers are not enthusiastic about giving different tasks to different students in the class because they need time and expertise in planning such tasks.

New teachers in their first-year teaching remotely are required to deal with knowledge and skills, while it is not sure that they have been systematically trained for this as part of the teaching training. In distance learning, the new teachers are required to show flexibility. The challenge is to plan teaching-learning moves that change according to the order of the hour, to the learners, to the resources available or not available in their home, to strengthen the interpersonal relationship with the students and their parents, and to adapt the teaching to the student's personal needs (Kwok, 2018)

The research questions are: (1) What are the first-year teachers' perceptions of diversity in distance learning classes? (2) What actions did the teachers take to address diversity in class in distance learning?

The importance of internationalisation in learning is well established, with increased value being placed on how college students are able to navigate the challenges associated with the development of intercultural competencies (Villar-Onrubia & Rajpal, 2016). As society becomes more global, questions have been raised about how postsecondary institutions integrate global thinking into student identity development to prepare students for their futures in a global society (Chickering & Braskamp, 2009). Traditionally, intercultural learning activities such as study abroad experiences have been identified as high-impact practices that support postsecondary student global and identity development (AAC&U, n.d.; Dresen et al., 2019). However, the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted those traditional in-person learning experiences that foster cross-cultural exchanges (Fabuer, 2022). Additionally, graduate students often experience unique personal circumstances including full-time employment, family responsibilities, and finances that act as barriers for participating in traditional study abroad programmes (Nicklin et al., 2019). Taking these barriers into consideration, there are now increased investments in virtual exchange programs to create more inclusive educational opportunities for all university students, while simultaneously supporting their development of global and intercultural competencies.

While there is great benefit for graduate students to develop their intercultural competencies and engage in more equitable global learning opportunities, limited research currently exists on graduate students engaged in global online collaborations, as well as how this potentially impacts their identity development as students and professionals. Student development theory highlights how students grow holistically and with increased complexity during their time in tertiary education (Patton et al., 2016). Graduate students are often contending with the development of multiple identities, as their new identity as an academic researcher grows and intersects with other parts of their identity such as gender, sex, age, profession, and nationality (Nygaard & Savva, 2021). Therefore, the aim of our research sought to understand how participating in a global online learning exchange contributed to graduate student identity development and transformation.

This research was guided by Chickering's (1969) Seven Vectors of College Student Development. In his understanding of student development, he proposed that students experience and evolve by seven vectors - building competence, managing emotions, establishing autonomy, developing identity, assessing interpersonal relationships, and constructing purpose and integrity - that impact the psychological development of the student within the higher education environment. While the original theoretical framework was focused on the traditional student experience, subsequent research has expanded Chickering's theory, creating a more expansive understanding of the current student profile (McDowell & Higbee, 2014), as well as how it can apply in global learning opportunities (Kahn & Agnew, 2015). For this study, participation in virtual exchange experiences, including active collaboration with local and international peers, provides the opportunity to further develop oneself within the higher education setting. Specifically, use of virtual exchanges including engaging with new peer groups, participating in new interactions and developing relationships, and continuing towards an engaged and trustworthy understanding of the global landscape are compelling opportunities for one's postsecondary student development. McDowell and Higbee (2014) noted that "students sometimes have to reconsider how they perceive themselves and others as they engage in new relationships and gain new perspectives" (p. 229). Thus, as virtual exchanges emerge as a global learning tool, participating in virtual exchanges provide a unique opportunity for students to participate in academic experiences that lend to the development of their postsecondary student selves. Furthermore, unlike other student development theories, Chickering identifies that student development may not occur in a linear progression, rather students can develop within each vector at various times.

Thus the current study sought to understand: How does participating in a global online learning exchange contribute to graduate student identity development?

In recent decades, the formal and informal education frameworks in Israel and around the world have been dealing with accelerated migration processes that expose children and educators to diverse populations in terms of national, religious, racial, cultural, linguistic, and more. Educators face complex challenges at the individual level and the organization of differential teaching-learning processes, responding to differences and social integration (Ang et al., 2007).

Educators work to deal with the challenges of migration in a global multicultural environment in which children are integrated into their learning abilities, forms of communication, learning styles, mastery of the school language, interests, experiences, socio-economic background, and background. To succeed in this task, they are required to show understanding, flexibility, and balance between the different dynamics of different cultural environments, an appreciation of the differences that exist between them, and the ability to deal with situations of uncertainty (Ng et al., 2012; Erez et al., 2013).

As a response to these challenges, Earley and Ang (2003) developed a multidimensional model for cultural intelligence based on the cultural intelligence model of Sternberg and Detterman (1986). Cultural intelligence is one of the many types of intelligence which related to the ability to solve practical problems from the "real world" (Gardner & Moran, 2006) and not only issues in the academic context that fit the IQ definition of Schmidt and Hunter (2000). Reiter and Luria (2021) note that this ability includes mental, motivational, and behavioral skills focused on solving problems in a culturally diverse environment. Those with a high level of cultural intelligence can deeply understand intercultural situations and make effective adjustments in how they interpret a particular case, react to it, or conduct themselves in it.

According to Earley and Ang (2003), the four CQ (=cultural intelligence) components are abilities that are distinct from each other and correlated with each other. The combination of them creates overall cultural intelligence. This ability is an acquired ability that can be developed:

1. The metacognitive factor - deals with the mental ability to understand cultural knowledge.

2. The cognitive factor - related to the general knowledge of norms, practices, and conventions

3. The motivational factor - the individual's tendency to focus his attention on learning intercultural differences and improving his ability to function in situations involving new cultures.

4. The behavioral factor - the individual's ability to present in culturally diverse interactions with verbal and non-verbal responses.

From the pedagogical point of view of teachers' trainers, it was found that many students who experience teaching in elementary school report a fear of meeting socio-cultural, linguistic, socio-economic, national, and religious diversity, skin color, and more (Caspe, Lopez, Chu, & Weiss, 2011; Patte, 2011). Education researchers (Hammerness, 2006; Feiman-Nemser, 2011) claim that shaping a multicultural educational concept is a lengthy process that refers to the child's personal, family, and cultural contexts. Whereas in practice, teacher training is content with a simple theoretical look at the culture of the children's families as a collection of holidays, foods, and special days while avoiding an authentic encounter with family heritage or knowledge resources that can be harnessed to the learning experience in the classroom and the cultivation of cultural intelligence among educators (LeFevre & Shaw, 2012; Iwai, 2013).

The two goals of the study are to examine perceptions and attitudes about cultural intelligence among education students studying for a teaching certificate in elementary school at two large colleges in the center of the country and to indicate actions in the teacher training process that promote the development of cultural intelligence among students.

Educational colleges in Israel and the world must adapt the training structure and teaching content to the challenging and multi-channel reality of life in the 21st century. They must adapt the teaching-learning methods and their teaching experiences to the new world where the boundaries of knowledge acquisition are open, and the tendency to use artificial intelligence to strengthen linguistic literacy is increasing (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Gaudelli, & Ousley, 2009).

The training process of pre-service teachers in Israel combines the acquisition of theoretical knowledge with practical training acquired during the experience at school. This training focuses on one discipline, although solving real-world problems requires integrating knowledge and understanding across multiple disciplines. Moreover, there is a decrease in children's ability to acquire linguistic knowledge, explain messages, reason, and organize the acquired knowledge while ensuring its cohesion (Schleicher, 2017).

Studies (Berninger, & Abbott, 2010; Giroux, & Moje, 2017) prove that integrating linguistic literacy in various disciplines, such as science, mathematics, history, and more, enables children to strengthen their ability to ask questions, understand complex texts, develop critical thinking while expressing an opinion in writing and orally, present an argument, and more. Therefore, international tests such as PISA and PIRLS (OECD, 2013) and integrative programs such as SERP Generative Word - (https://access.serpinstitute.org/wordgen-elementary/) have become significant. Furthermore, acquiring linguistic literacy is critical for children from immigrant families and non-native Hebrew-speaking children who are integrated into multicultural and multilingual schools (Kramsch, 1998).

Science and technology education aims to develop adults using scientific and technological knowledge to manage and improve their lives. It is the role of teachers to create activities for children who will begin to think like scientists and allows for opportunities to develop literacy skills such as reading comprehension, expressing an opinion in writing and orally, merging information, drawing scientific conclusions, writing observation reports, and more. That is to aid them in becoming well-informed scientists like adults. These will promote a better understanding of the scientific phenomena in broader contexts (Catts, & Kamhi, 2017; Goldman, et.al, 2016).

It can be proven that pre-service teachers training to teach are not skilled enough to teach linguistic literacy and integrate it into other disciplines (Brassler, & Dettmers, 2017; Hikida, et.al, 2019). This study emphasizes the partnership training of two pedagogical instructors whose expertise is in different disciplines: language and sciences. This partnership contributes to a unique training process for the pre-service teachers: (1) Expands the possibilities for acquiring pedagogical and disciplinary knowledge to promote interdisciplinary teaching: (2) Strengthens their linguistic knowledge and literacy skills to adjust teaching methods for children whose mother tongue is not Hebrew.

Integrating disciplines is a challenge in the training process of teaching pre-service teachers. The training partners, including the pedagogical instructors, teacher trainers, and pre-service teachers, are experts in a specific discipline. That's why the teaching experience at schools, especially culturally and linguistically diverse schools, is a powerful platform for a partnership between two pedagogical instructors to show the process of interdisciplinary teaching-learning. In this method, the study presents unique and innovative training.

In this study, we examined the contribution of integrative and co-training of two pedagogical instructors from the fields of language and science. Research questions: (1) What were the perceptions of the science education pre-service teacher regarding the integration of linguistic literacy in science lessons? (2) What actions did the pre-service teacher undertake to integrate linguistic literacy into her science lessons? (3) What were the implications of the integration training on the pre-service teacher's ability to teach a multicultural and multilingual class?

The ongoing accusation of Chinese international students’ utilizing memorization in learning is an ignorance of the fact that memorization has central importance in their learning process (Biggs 1996), which is derived from unique linguistic and cultural complex settings in Chinese education (Tan 2011). It is important for educators to be aware of the cognitive, emotional and relational perspectives in this complexity (Portera 2014).

Chinese international students’ learning styles are more subtle and complex than they appear (Xu 2019). Chinese students are often criticized for lacking the ability to use deep learning approaches and instead memorizing the materials without understanding (Murphy 1987), with learning strategies limited to reception, repetition, review and reproduction (Hu 2002). The concept of ‘surface approach’ is frequently used when referring to Chinese students’ learning and they are labelled as “rote learners” (Watkins and Biggs 1996), “passive learners” (Clark and Gieve 2006) or “inferior” in learning (Jiang and Smith 2009). Western educators have undervalued Chinese students’ learning strategies by confusing learning through memorization and repetition with rote learning.

Memorization as a key area of focus for research seeks to understand aspects of how Chinese students learn (Ryan 2010). It was shown to be a central component of the Chinese education system and is widely used by students who come to the West. Research shows that memorization can lead to “deep learning” (McMahon 2011), that students use memorization as a purposeful learning strategy (Li and Cutting 2011), and that memorization and understanding are not mutually exclusive categories (Mathias, Bruce, and Newton 2013). Memorization has never been seen as an end in itself by Chinese learners but as a prelude to deeper understanding and may include elements of constructivist learning. There is a clear difference between rote learning (mechanical learning without meaning) and repetition for memorizing content, where the intention is to develop understanding and discover new meaning. Chinese students use the latter more than the former, especially when they prepare for exams. Similarly, Mathias et al. (2013) draw on the earlier work of Trigwell, Prosser and Waterhouse (1999), who suggest that both deep (by understanding) and surface (only by memorizing) approaches should be considered to be simultaneously present in students’ learning.

In Chinese education, memorising is commonly used in primary and junior high school education where language teachers constantly ask the students to recite texts and test them on their recall of the content. Chinese students develop certain memorisation skills in their childhood as they are asked to memorise classical texts from ancient times. There is an old saying ‘Memorise 300 Tang poems and one can at least recite them if unable to compose a poem himself’ (熟读唐诗三百首，不会作诗也会吟). Large amounts of memorisation are encouraged in Chinese primary and secondary education, as it is perceived beneficial to creative writing in the end. Ask any Chinese learner who has memorised the multiplication tables, and they would say that the experience of learning them is like ‘singing a song’ (Tan 2011).

By adopting a practice-based approach, this paper disputes the oversimplification and extends existing knowledge of memorisation to investigate what doings, sayings and relatings (Schatzki (Schatzki 2019) are in memorization and how it becomes embodied through long-term repetitive practices (Dall’Alba and Barnacle 2007). Through a practice lens, this paper closely examines students’ memorization practices by focusing on what practices Chinese students use in their memorization, and how their existing repertoire of sociocultural and educational practices are entwined in this complex phenomenon.

The paper answers the joint call by discussing “multiliteracies” (New London Group 2000) both from a conceptual as well as a methodological perspective in an innovative setting for cultural and intercultural learning. With reference to the Italian-German project “Historical learning processes of primary school children in museum collections” – funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) – we examine performatively emerging multiliteracies with a focus on historical learning of German and Italian primary school children in the pedagogical framework of social education in German and Italian primary schools.

Multiliteracies are key to prepare students for a successful life in rapidly changing social contexts (New London Group 2000) – particularly in their future “working, public and private lives” (ibid., 10–17). Educators consequently design educational activities for students to acquire multiliteracies and to help students in designing their own “social futures” through adapting to and critically examining existing social designs (ibid., 7). We extend this approach to primary school children (ages 8 to 11), whose lives are not yet as distinctly organized in social worlds of working, public and private lives as those of adults. However, children are constantly ‘listening in’ on adult worlds or are “participating peripherally” in them (Lave and Wenger 2011). Because of this, primary school education strives to systematize children’s often partial and random experiences into ‘literate’ and scientific experiences (Duncker and Popp 2003). We therefore call these multiliteracies of primary school children ‘emergent’. We argue that such multiliteracies can be conveyed by contact with collection objects in museums. Collection objects as part of a society’s cultural heritage can give children access to a society’s cultural codes and language (Wagner 2022). By laying open cultural codes for learners, greater social justice and inclusion can be achieved (Chistolini 2019). The examination of cultural codes through collection objects opens a methodological perspective on other intercultural settings.

Schwartz (2008) holds that museums are particularly suitable for teaching multiliteracies through the study of museum designs and the displays of objects in museums. However, scholarly literature has so far neither paid much attention to teaching multiliteracies in museums (ibid.), nor considered the untapped potentials of objects and object interactions in museums for interdisciplinary research (Barsch and van Norden 2020). While most studies in the field highlight the cultural meanings of collection objects and their multimodal encoding in museum displays (f. e. Kress 2000), they often do so without considering the visitors’ museum experience (Schwartz 2008). By emphasizing the cultural meanings of collection objects and displays, the inherent “obstinacy of things” (Hahn 2015) is not taken into account, i. e. the resistance of material objects to interpretive closure and the excess of meanings which cannot be easily subsumed under cultural meanings. Our project leverages the obstinacy of things by allowing children to make their own experiences with collection objects and their “affordances” (Norman 1999), i. e. the objects’ material properties offering clues as to how the object could or should be experienced. In doing so, we examine the potential of collection objects for primary school children’s learning of multiliteracies and cultural codes as well as asking pedagogical questions about ‘open futures’, i. e. futures which are shaped by the children and not by present social demands.

Because primary school children mostly experience objects through direct physical interaction, we created “contact zones” (Clifford 1997; Wagner 2010) in specifically designed exhibitions to give children access to historical objects – or their replicas – in two school-related collections: Schulmuseum –Werkstatt für Schulgeschichte (School Museum – Workshop for School History) in Leipzig, Germany and Fondo Pizzigoni (Pizzigoni Fund) in Rome, Italy.

This presentation draws on an extensive collection of research: Arts-based Practices with Young People at the Edge (Price, MacGill & Carter, 2023), evidencing the affordances of a range of community initiatives applying arts-based approaches designed to reconnect young people with the worlds of learning and work, thus facilitating re-engagement and productive identity shifts.

Globally, young people are encountering and navigating multiple social, cultural, relational, economic and educational forces that challenge traditional understandings and possibilities of being successful in school, and the life trajectories that should follow. This research highlights the value of promoting diversity within educational research through the arts, by creating practices for young people to imagine new and multiple ways of being in the world and to provide personal and collective resources and repertoires to create stories that value their life-worlds and experiences.

Contributors to this project have long histories of working and researching in out-of-school programs for young people and youth who are living in high poverty communities, are unemployed or underemployed and many have not completed a formal qualification at school or beyond. Central to this research are the range of arts-based approaches and methodologies that were developed in collaboration with young people and the affordances of the material and philosophical production of making in the arts, diverging from exploring the intrinsic and instrumental benefits of the arts. This research highlights the transformational practices of making that occurs where youth identity intersects at site specific moments. Thereby, this presentation points to the affordances of youth participation in co-designing sustainable creative learning opportunities to develop alternative learner identities.

Underpinned by social justice and intercultural understanding, this research questions the deficit positioning of young people and their engagement with formal education systems. The presentation will draw attention to the complexity of systemic issues around youth disengagement and the possibilities of collective creativity to navigate these broken systems and inform new and sustainable futures. It identifies key challenges young people face in contemporary post-industrial societies in finding work and meaning and details some hopeful sites of practice in a range of diverse contexts.

In advancing opportunities for engaging young people in multiple modes of meaning, new modalities and innovative learning environments, identities and biographies of multilinguals, digital media, and (multi)literacy practices, these Arts-Based Practices showcase the divergent global practices of youth arts organisations and creative methodologies mobilised across creative projects that promote assets-based approaches towards young people.

Youth arts organisations and youth arts projects reveal the local and specific contexts of sites where young people, arts organisations and researchers co-design creative projects. At the cen­tre of these projects, diverse examples are provided to highlight how creative young people involved in youth arts projects have shaped and directed the creative actions and outcomes of the projects. There are multiple examples of non-formal learning; youth arts projects where learning occurs not just for the sake of learning, but where art teaches us to sit in relation to the world (Biesta, 2017).

Creating art works offers opportunities for unearthing blocked emo­tions and resistance. It is the combination of working with resistant and unruly materials when making art that enacts or parallels the often-uncharted internal conflicts one carries unconsciously. The young partici­pants’ art experiences are varied but they all include making art―such as drawing, sculpture―or co-designing art works. Through the art-making process there is also exploration of ideas and emotions that emerge. These opportunities inform relational aesthetic practices (Bourriaud, 2002) that form the basis of unearthing new ways of seeing, new conversations and new ways of being in the world. In this way, art teaches us to re-read the world (Biesta, 2017).

Today, even though many children are multilingual, pedagogical resources in schools across Europe continue to reflect monolingualism and monoculturalism as a norm (Adams, 2021; Adam & Barratt-Pugh, 2021; Suuriniemi & Katokangas, 2020). Furthermore, when pedagogies are developed without students’ direct participation, even ‘well-intended’ practices may stereotype cultural and linguistic minority students (Szelei et al., 2019).

Research shows that using pedagogical resources (e.g. picturebooks) that mobilise students’ multiliteracy skills may help learning about diverse students in the classroom (Sanchez, 2009), affirming multilingual students in educational activities (McGilp, 2014; Pietikäinen & Pitkänen-Huhta, 2013), initiating discussions of equity and justice (Clarke & Broders, 2022), and foster critical thinking (Dolan, 2014). Consequently, there is a need to develop pedagogical resources and practices through participatory action with students and families (Sanchez, 2009; Szelei et al., 2019), in order to challenge monolingual norms in schools, and provide opportunities for intercultural and multilingual learning for the whole educational community (Heggernes, 2021).

Co-creative methods have been long seen as potential ways to increase students’ participation and to address educational injustice in policy, practice and research (Mitchell et al, 2017; Van Praag, 2019). In this vein, we initiated a participatory visual-methods project (Mitchell et al., 2017) with multilingual families in Belgium to create a storybook. Through participatory and multimodal action, we intended to center the real-life experiences of multilingual children, as well as their multiliteracy skills when creating a pedagogical resource. This book is currently being finalised and will then be piloted in primary schools in Belgium. In order to authentically represent the experiences and knowledges of multilingual families, we opted for a book concept that embraced the features of multimodality. This included the principles of: text reflecting meaning through typset, interactive narration, images expanding meaning and applying multiple perspectives (Hasset & Curwood, 2009, p. 274). We also actively valued and displayed the many languages participants used in real life (McGilp, 2014).

Co-creating a ‘product’ enables scientific inquiry, and it also results in an actual output for participants and the wider community (Mitchell et al., 2017, p. 32). However, the many challenges of participatory production are also well-known. Constraints in time, funding, the structures, and unequal relationships between participants and researchers are highlighted (Fritz & Binder, 2018). Moreover, products resulting from participatory visual-methods research are also shaped by participants’ understandings, motives and actions regarding which target groups they would like to potentially have an influence on (Mitchell et al., 2017). To our knowledge, there is little knowledge on how participatory visual-methods projects with multilingual families challenge monolingual language ideologies in schools, and what specific processes, roles and motivations are involved in such projects.

Therefore, we analyse the processes and the product of a participatory visual-methods project that aimed to mobilise the experience of multilingualism as told by multilingualism in pedagogical practice. Specifically, we here pay attention to how research participants drew on or limited their own multiliteracy repertoires (text production in multiple languages and visual production) when creating a storybook intended for pedagogical use, as well as readership beyond the family context. We asked: How did participants mobilise their multiliteracy repertoires during the co-creation process? How did the original verbal and visual narratives of multilingualism change for fictional stories in the storybook? What were the underlying reasons of these changes?

The global composition of societies is changing rapidly with an increase in migration, refugees and asylum seekers across the world. This has created challenges for education systems in delivering equitable and quality education for all learners, particularly for teachers in culturally diverse classrooms. Teachers play a crucial role in ensuring equitable education, as recognized by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) passed by the United Nations in 2015. Despite this, many teachers worldwide struggle to meet the changing demands of students in culturally diverse classrooms.

Our contribution aims to present an interdisciplinary research idea that aims to develop global competences from the use of multimodal and transcultural narratives in the university classroom.

By transcultural narratives we mean a broad spectrum of literary, hybrid and polysemous texts, as well as films and graphic novels that cross or transcend different languages and cultures, and are thus characterised by cultural hybridity and plural linguistic and visual codes, by the intersection of semiotic systems such as word-image constellations

Our research project critically reflects on the current curricular standards in these areas by sensitising 'student teachers' to 'become active citizens in an interconnected' (OECD, 2018, 58) and rapidly changing world and, at the same time, developing respect and understanding and concern for the other.

Dealing with transcultural authors and texts makes it easier for trainee teachers to implement innovative teaching formats for diversity-sensitive teaching based on action-oriented approaches. Due to their distinct factuality and authenticity, transcultural narratives offer direct access to reflection and to the discussion of concepts such as plural identities, ways of promoting global citizenship, activating cognitive, emotional and social participation.

From the data gathered through narrative methods and reflection, we promise further insights into the extent to which multimodal transcultural texts can not only support diversity-sensitive teaching practices, but also the need to reconsider and highlight interdisciplinary training for teachers and student teachers.

Our theoretical framework draws on theoretical approaches that emphasise the need to rethink the concepts of citizenship, identity, diversity and relating to diversity by recognising the potential of hybrid and multiple identities (Bhabha, 1994; Nussbaum 2010; Welsch, 2000).

Dealing with authors and texts that come from an in-between space where teachers and students can and sometimes have to decide between different culturally-shaped offers of identification (values, traditions, lifestyles, roles and life projects) motivates them to reflect on the phenomena of cultural fluidity and the self in our society.

With regard to the concept of transculturality, it is necessary to refer to the reflections with which Welsch (2020) opened the discussion in the field of cultural studies, clarifying that the concept reflects the interweaving, interpenetration and hybridisation of cultures, in a network vision in which it is necessary to start from the specificities of the subject, from categories such as gender, generation, age, sexuality, geopolitical social environment and others, going beyond the narratives of original and initial subjectivities to focus on moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of differences. Accepting Welsch's proposal does not, however, prevent us from strengthening the potential of dialogue between the concepts of interculturality and transculturality.

The specific aims of our research project are to understand whether transcultural narratives can contribute to:
- addressing the challenges of complexity in teacher education;
- promoting global competences;
- grasping the multiple cultural and identity intersections of individuals who need to work together across national boundaries.

Teacher learning in the context of pedagogies for linguistic and cultural diversity is not a recent desideratum in educational policies, teacher education, professional development, and schools.

At the European level, Putjata et al. (2022) underline the need and the challenges of a multilingual turn in teachers’ professionalism, as regards linguistic diversity in society and schools, in students’ profiles and learning scenarios, but also as a path to overcome traditional linguistic hierarchies, marginalisation, invisibilisation, and social injustices perpetuated through teaching practices and school language policies. Among the conclusions, the striking role of teachers’ autobiographical experiences with multilingualism in education, is highlighted: “Personal and professional experiences at school shape their approaches to pedagogy as well as their ways of dealing with multilingualism in the classroom” (p.400). Additionally, teachers’ cognitions and language ideologies regarding multilingualism and multilingual education have proven to be an important factor when discussing classroom and overall school practices, notably as regards variations between monolingual and multilingual mindsets (Paulsrud, Juvonen, & Schalley, 2023).

Duarte et al. (2023), analysing research priorities about multilingualism in education in five European countries (Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, and Spain), conclude that it is relevant to research educational interventions resorting to multilingual approaches and their effectiveness, and that teachers’ didactical knowledge is crucial to the implementation of multilingual approaches in mainstream settings. Moreover, Krulatz et al. (2022) reinforce the role of professional development initiatives to the reconfiguration of teachers’ cognitions on the topic of multilingualism and pedagogical practices in linguistically diverse classrooms. Yet, the authors also reveal that the effects of such initiatives may vary according to participants’ personal and contextual situations, and that teacher educators would need to consider the structure of the intervention and the content and how it is delivered. Dockrell et al. (2022) carried out a survey across different (eleven) European countries (including Portugal) on teachers’ views about multilingualism. As conclusions, the authors point out that policies should be more attentive to structural and contextual factors involved in teachers’ challenges in implementing multilingual teaching practices, and that teacher education practices would need to focus on developing teachers’ multilingual awareness and diversity responsive teaching.

Current education policy in Portugal speaks in favour of inclusive education, making the case that “all students should have access, participate and be supported to succeed within mainstream settings” (Alves, 2019). Legislative frameworks, such as Decree-Law 54/2018, which determines the juridical regime on inclusive education, state as guiding principle (among others) to “value learners’ and community’s linguistic diversity, as an expression of individual and collective identity”. Yet, regarding pluri/multilingual education, studies have signalled that teachers’ need professional development that supports them in embracing the multilingual turn in education (Pinho & Moreira, 2012; Szelei, Pinho & Tinoca, 2021).

This presentation reports a case study that addresses in-service language teachers’ learning about pluri/multilingual (and intercultural) education when involved in a one-year learning community in a Portuguese public, urban school. This community involved 23 teachers of a language department (which included official languages of the national curriculum offered at that school: language of schooling – Portuguese – and foreign languages, e.g., English, French, and Spanish).

The following research questions guide the study:

• What is the in-service language teachers’ understanding of pluri/multilingualim and plurilingual education, and how does such understanding evolve?
• What opportunities and challenges do the participants identify regarding pluri/multilingualim and plurilingual education in schools?
• What are the main professional development needs expressed by the teachers before, during and after the involvement in the learning community?
• How do the participating teachers assess the dynamics of the learning community?

While diversity of both people and forms of making meaning in a globally networked world are central to the concept of multiliteracies and the work of the New London Group (1996), questions surrounding how to centre learners’ diverse languages, cultures and identities in formal systems of schooling continue to challenge scholars around the world. Among the promising, evidence-informed approaches that could support children’s multiliteracies learning, while embracing cultural and linguistic plurality, is making (author et al., 2022; Calabrese Barton et al., 2017). Indeed, a renewed interest in making, the profound way that children create artifacts that reflect and enable them to share their identities (Papert, 1980), includes a particular focus on blending hands-on traditions to create with digital tools, including robotics, textile crafts, and digital storytelling as but a few examples (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014; Schad & Jones, 2020).

Fundamentally, who makes, whose ideas, languages and cultures matter is part of both making and meaning making. While the capital-M Maker Movement that emerged in the mid-2000s has been criticized for advancing a narrow view of making focused heavily on engineering and technology, representing white, male, dominant middle-class Makers (Vossoughi, Hooper & Escudé, 2016), there is a growing body of researchers calling to shift towards conceptions of agentive (Clapp et al., 2016), culturally situated making practices (Castek, Hagerman & Woodard, 2019; Vossoughi, Hooper & Escudé, 2016) that are embedded in students’ identities (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014) and meaningful for them and their communities. Indeed, this paper seeks to explore the potential of making multiliteracies in classrooms with a central focus on (re)centring the stories, languages and cultures of youth in schools.

Building on previous research on the development of traditional, disciplinary and digital literacies through making (author, 2019; author, 2022), this paper proposes the application of the concept of ‘multiliteracies’ (New London Group, 1996) to explore the possibilities and tensions of equity-oriented maker education for celebrating children’s cultural and linguistic diversity. To do so, this paper will draw from data collected in two phases of a larger study on maker education. In phase 1, to address some of the gaps in the emerging field of maker education (Rouse & Gillespie Rouse, 2022; Schad & Jones, 2020), a scoping review of the literature was conducted to carefully map existing literature on physical and digital making activities in grades 4-8 classrooms around the globe.

In the ongoing second phase of the study, 41 school teams were invited to participate in a year-long case study exploring maker activities in grades 4-8 classrooms across Canada. As migration-related diversity increases rapidly in schools in Canada, a country where immigrants represent nearly one quarter of the country’s population (Statistic Canada 2022a), we investigate the potential for making to enable all students to see their cultural and linguistic repertoires better reflected through maker multiliteracies. Moreover, this study includes 10 French minority-language schools, a sociolinguistic context that has yet to be explored in the field of maker education. While Canada has both French and English as its official languages, this language is only spoken by between 1-3% of the population in all provinces but Québec and the number of citizens who speak this language is consistently decreasing across the country (Statistics Canada, 2022b). This paper will make connections between findings from the scoping review and particular cases in Canadian schools to explore how educators around the world can leverage making to create meaningful multiliteracies learning opportunities that embrace diversity, promote language revitalization for minority languages, and are connected to students’ languages, identities and lives.

Across European classrooms, there is a shared challenge regarding quality teaching and learning for students who are still learning the language of instruction. In a review of the research on the complexities of preparing quality teachers in general content classrooms to work with multilingual students, Viesca et al. (2019) argued that teacher orientations, context, and pedagogy are major domains for teacher learning and practice for improving quality multilingual/multicultural teaching. This study builds on that conceptualization to focus on orientations that elevate, embrace, and sustain diversity/differences.

Orientations, in our work, is a capacious notion that captures attitudes, ideologies, beliefs, perspectives, etc. Similar to how one can orient themself in a direction (e.g., east, north, etc.), we suggest that in classrooms, teachers can orient themselves in a variety of directions, some that limit the possibilities of diversity being positive. However, teachers can also orient themselves in directions that elevate, embrace and sustain diversity. The direction, or orientation, that decisions, actions, policies, and practices move in impacts the learning community and teaching/learning within it broadly. Therefore, we assert that orientations are at the core of multiliteracies in intercultural and multilingual education and, thus, worthy of empirical investigation.

Research supports our assertion, suggesting that a positive diversity climate at school can improve students’ well-being and life satisfaction (Aldridge et al., 2018). It has also been shown to reduce minoritized youths’ personal experiences of discrimination (Heikamp et al., 2020), making it imperative to create. Specifically, research shows that perceptions of a positive diversity climate buffer against personal experiences of discrimination and thus predict better belonging among minoritized students (Baysu et al, 2016; Heikamp et al., 2020; Lee, 2017). Further, a positive climate, including contact and cooperation among students, multicultural values, and emphasis on a common humanity, is positively associated with the intercultural competence of both immigrant and non‐immigrant background students (Schwarzenthal et al., 2020).

Despite such clear benefits of embracing diversity and creating a positive climate for it in classrooms, many teachers, students, and school communities struggle to create the opportunity for diversity to be positive and productive. In schools, there is often a dominant cultural narrative that difference is deficit (Mitchell, 2013), as identified through research on race, language, social class, ability levels, religious backgrounds, culture, gender, sexuality, and other identity markers that can minoritize and “otherize” students, teachers, and other members of school communities (Spencer et al., 2020). These issues impact students’ perceptions of belonging (Lee, 2017). They can play a role in violent and deeply troubling bullying issues (Siperstein et al., 2022) and impact academic achievement. Further, the pandemic has exacerbated many issues for students and teachers from minoritized groups (Meinck et al., 2022). Poor mental health is dramatically rising (Theberath et al., 2022), and there is an increasing call for attention to social and emotional learning and well-being in schools (Heineke & Vera, 2022).

Therefore, creating a positive diversity climate in schools is necessary, though there are myriad barriers to overcome to develop such a climate for schools across Europe. Yet, for cultural hybridity and multimodality in classrooms to be possible, differences must be grappled with and sustained in positive ways, especially in classrooms committed to innovative, deep learning in inclusive learning environments. This study uses five orientations to examine challenges and possibilities for improving how teachers embrace, elevate, and sustain diversity in their learning environments to benefit their multilingual and multicultural students.

The paper derives from the research project Language policies and practices of diverse immigrant families in Iceland and their implications for education (LPP). The project aims at critically exploring the language policies and practices of diverse immigrant families (Curdt-Christiansen, Schwartz & Vershik, 2013), how these impact their children’s education and the relationships between these families, their heritage language communities, their teachers, and principals.

The aim of this paper is to explore teachers and principals’ opinions and actions to meet everyday challenges in teaching and supporting well-being amongst their students with immigrant background, in compulsory schools in Iceland. Also, to bring forth teachers and principals professional experience of the educational policy in Iceland with regards to implementation and practice in relation to the same student group.

Migration to Iceland has grown rapidly in recent years and the changing demographics have had an impact on society as well as the education system. Immigrants in Iceland were 61,148 on 1 January 2022 or 16.3% of the total population, compared to being less than 8% in 2020. People born in Poland were the largest group of immigrants on 1 January 2022 as in the previous years, 20,896 or 34.2% of the total immigrant population (Statistics Iceland). Preschools and compulsory schools have developed reception plans and some teaching strategies to welcome children of immigrant origin. The need for support from educational authorities has been different between schools and communities. In general, the challenges have been very diverse, and so is the response and support schools have got.

The theoretical framework here builds on new policy documents regarding education in Iceland, set to act upon changes and challenges in Icelandic society and guide the development within the school system in near future. These include New education strategy 2030 approved by the parliament in March 2021, and its First action plan 2021-2024 published in September same year. Icelandic school staff, teachers and principals, have expressed concern for students with immigrant background (Jónsdóttir, 2021). Their worries are supported by for example results in PISA, as children with immigrant background in Iceland perform less than children with non-immigrant background (Education for all in Iceland: External Audit of the Icelandic System for Inclusive Education, 2017).

. Many schools in the Nordic countries are characterised by diversity when it comes to the students' ethnic origin, mother tongue, religion and social class. As Norway and Denmark have become multicultural societies, classrooms have become a central arena for students with a different cultural, linguistic and religious background than Norwegian. In my research project, I will also bring out the discourse on the notion of national identities, which governs the school system in Norway and Denmark. There is limited research in multicultural education, both internationally and in a Scandinavian context (Fylkesnes, 2018). As most of the research on teacher education and cultural diversity generally focuses on student teachers, recent developments in teacher education research point to the need for a greater focus on teacher education (Cohran - Smith et al., 2014 in Fylkesnes et al., 2018).

In the following, I will briefly outline the concepts that I plan to use in my study. I begin by presenting a series of knowledge of the cultural sociologist Stuart Hall's (1996) conceptualization of cultural identities, which is used with a view to analyzing minority students' experiences and experiences in school as well as their cultural identity construction. Hall's theory is used to describe complex cultural identities, including minority groups in schools. Hall (1996, p. 4) defines identity as "multiple" and never "singular," and it is constructed across different, often intersecting antagonistic discourses, practices, and positions. He argues that identity is constantly changing and transforming. This aspect is included in the analysis of the school. In his conception of multiple identities, Hall emphasizes identities as positions (Basha, 2022 ).

The project will also include Frederik Barth's (1970) theory to investigate whether and how informants articulate persistent boundaries between an imagined ethnic Norwegian and an imagined ethnic other group, and whether ethnicity becomes a primary category in the school context. With the concept of belonging, I am thinking of drawing on Yuval-Davis (2006, p.202) who argues that constructs of belonging cannot and should not be seen as mere cognitive histories, but as constructs that reflect emotional investments and a desire for attachment. In other words, a desire and a longing to become part of and belong to a group or society.

Internationalisation is a key priority for global universities in an interconnected and globalised world. Increased international student enrolments has seen universities invest in creating environments that can better support not only international students´ academic development but also the social and emotional dimensions of campus life (Schweitzer et al., 2011). The pandemic has foregrounded the importance of building and sustaining connectedness as a key dimension of effective teaching and learning (Doucet et al., 2020; Mulrooney & Kelly, 2020). Scholarship has consistently found that international students struggle with isolation and loneliness (Khanal & Gaulee, 2019), which can impact negatively on academic achievement and psychological wellbeing (Khawaja & Stallman, 2011). Further, there is evidence that the wellbeing of international students, has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic (Hurst, 2021; Nguyen & Balakrishnan, 2020).

Hotta and Ting- Toomey (2013) assert that international students endure psychological and emotional difficulties when they study abroad and experience cultural shocks in the host countries. These psychological or emotional problems often stem from a sense of isolation that can accompany these international students throughout their study experiences in a foreign country. Thus, universities need to find effective ways to help students overcome their isolation and enable them to build a relationship with the universities and the local community. Studies on Asian international students (AIS) found that assisting AIS to have a sense of belonging to the colleges or universities they attend allows them to lower stress levels (Slaten, 2016).

Covid-19 has posed an enormous challenge to education worldwide, and international students have become the most vulnerable group in the midst of the pandemic. After the outbreak of Covid-19, many countries closed their borders, and the education model shifted to an online mode. These policies left many students with only online classes in their own country or host countries, significantly reducing their opportunities to interact with others.

While there are research investigating international student attrition in Australia is emergent, Shah, Mahadevan & Cheng (2021) found that since 2018, international students were increasingly withdrawing from their Australian university in favor of private colleges. The authors contend that universities need to be more proactive about attracting and retaining university students by attending not only to academic opportunities but also to international students’ personal needs, such as a welcoming campus environment (Choudaha & Schulmann, 2014). Similarly, over the past decade, counselling psychology research has explored on the negative impact of acculturative stress, social self-efficacy, college adjustment, and overall well-being on international students (K. T. Wang et al., 2015). Such projects are critical in understanding students’ challenges but they do not get to the crux of examining the cultural elements of well-being which includes: self-determination; sense of belonging, identity building, relationship building and social support. Scholars assert that giving students a sense of belonging to the university is one of the ultimate goals of social support in universities and that belongingness is also one of the basic human needs, according to psychologists(Glass & Westmont, 2014; Baumeister & Leary, 2017;).

Objectives of the study

• We need a more a more accessible understanding of wellbeing as including seemingly mundane practices in our everyday lives
• Contemporary students today are balancing a diverse challenges and responsibilities: coursework, relationships, adjusting to campus life, economic stress, social injustice, mass violence, and other types of loss associated with COVID-19.
• Universities are increasingly aware that it is critical to include a more comprehensive health culture into their policies, procedures, and regular campus life
• In a diverse society such as Australia, there are potentially substantial benefits to understanding which aspects of wellbeing are common across social and national borders.

As the effect of internationalization, getting international educational experience is a current trend among many developing countries. Studies have shown positive association between international education and employment, career choices and competency development. This systematic literature review is synthesizing the findings of empirical and survey based studies on various factors influencing international educational experience of international alumni. Web of Science and Scopus research database will be used for selecting the benchmark studies. Studies will be selected based on PRISMA parameters to enhance the quality of filtration. Selected studies will report the key factors, motivations and effects found among international alumni regarding their international mobility experiences. Previous studies confirm that, the factors affecting the experience of international mobility are from four themes: academic, socio-cultural, psychological and personal developmental. Which is why this study is aimed at investigating individual and contextual factors having significant impact on the quality of international educational experience among alumni.

Theoratical Framework:

Internationalization is defined as the process of incorporating international dimensions in the academics, research and functionality of academia (Knight, 1994). Studies conducted on international mobility and internationalization of higher education have arisen as a distinct area in the recent past. Research shows that students’ networks, cost of living and quality of international universities have stimulated international mobility (Beine et al., 2014). Geuna (2015) presented conclusive evidence about the significant positive impact of international educational mobility on knowledge production, academic throughput, enhanced skills, and bringing better intercultural competence in students. Consequently, enhanced capability to get a better carrier option with international mobility has been conveyed by a survey study conducted on Australian graduate students (Potts, 2015). Contemporary literature shows employment, competence development and foreign language proficiency have a strong association with international mobility (Gumus et al., 2019; Verbik and Lasanowski 2007; Safipour et al., 2017; Roy et al., 2019 and Weibel, 2019; Beine et al. 2014). There is a lack of work done to categorize of the factors affecting international educational mobility (Knight, 2012, Ergun & Kondakci, 2021, Byrne, 2022). This shouldn’t be ignored in order to best utilize the opportunities created by international mobility. Therefore, with the help of this systematic literature review research would like to understand factors, effects, and motivations for international educational mobility.

Language difference can become stigma and became also one of features of nowadays conflicts. Processes of stigmatisation were described and researched relatively sufficiently. We know a lot about stigmatised persons and their self-concept (Crocker & Major, 1989), concept of internalised oppression (Derthick, 2016; Pyke 2010) as well as strategies, how to cope with stigma (Crocker & Major, 1989; Derthick, 2016; Pyke, 2010).

Stigma can influence life also for several generations. Open conflicts bring psychological consequences for many generations (Wohl & Branscombe, 2004). Its main feature is assigning guilt to identity groups without individuals bearing any personal responsibility for the wrong doing (Wohl & Branscombe, 2004). It pays very often for visible difference (Allport, 1954; Samovar et al, 2013) but in present we also face a situation, where stigma linked to language became one of the root causes of the biggest war in Europe region in last decades.

Language, being a part of a cultural context, is one of the major variables, which define culture (Hamers and Blanc, 2003, p.8). In the context of Ukraine, it is rather two languages — Ukrainian and Russian that were since the time Ukraine gained its independence in 1991 used relatively equally in all spheres — education, media, health, trade, different areas of social life, etc. Conflicted Ukrainian bilingualism is a destabilizing factor, but the problem is not bilingualism per se; rather a forced tendency to build a national identity on exclusive instead of inclusive principles. The topic of bilingualism stays controversial, with political tension continuing to gather momentum on ethnic grounds and language being a resourceful fuel to keep the tension vital and viral. Language dwells at the core of any type of group identification: “The language is perceived as a group attribute and thus activates stereotypes and value judgments attributed to the speakers of this language” (Hamers and Blanc, 2003, p. 222). This approach allows to raise an argument that in bilingual societies in a state of inner conflict, such as nowadays Ukraine, bilingualism is a major conundrum. In a given situation, one language is stigmatized, evoking a general air of malaise, along with desirable yet, never achievable disdain. The Russian language has earned its adverse status in Ukraine due to political stands of Russia.

On a greater scale, beyond the boarders in Ukraine, it is not simply a language of the enemy; for many, the Russian language becomes the enemy itself, representing the voice of the oppressor, no matter who operates it. This approach results in:

- Stigmatisation of Russian speaking Ukrainians

- Stigmatisation of Russian speakers

- Stigmatisation of other Eastern Europeans in Western Europe if they speak Russian (or Ukrainian/Belarusian — the language is usually labeled as Russian by non-speakers).

Based on experiences from schools and from outside schools we formulated following research questions:

What role does language play in inter-ethnic relations?

How is langue issue linked to educational context in the war times?

Students are more likely to cross borders to pursue their studies as they reach more advanced levels of education (OECD 2022). According to the latest researches (Mok, Xiong, Ke, Cheung, 2021; Bilecen, 2020) and statistics (OECD 2022, UNESCO 2020) international student mobility has been rising considerably faster over the last three decades and now exeeding 4.4 million international students worldwide. Students mobility and the internationalization of higher education creates a better understanding of the diversity of experiences (França, Padilla, 2022).

Researchers (Shields 2019; Chung et al. 2018) who have studied first year students in higher education have found that a certain percentage of students do not complete their studies and obtain a bachelor's or master's degree. On the one hand, it depends on the entrants' own motivation and environmental factors (Eidimtas, Juceviciene 2014). On the other hand, it is noticed that one of the possible reasons for failure is racial, ethnic, socioeconomic differences (Banks and Banks, 2019; Quaye, 2019).

Another aspect, which researches (Museus 2014, Hurtado et. al. 2012) emphasize, that students came from abroad face with negative campus climates, higher levels of discrimination from faculty or local society and greater insensicity in the classroom than their colleagues.

International students’ past educational experiences, worldviews, and cultural approaches can be quite different from those of domestic student, even despite sharing the same racial background. Research has shown how international students from non-European countries are less socially engaged with their college than their European peers (Quaye, Harper, Pendakur, 2019). Other studies also stress, that student encounter with specific challenges for example: English language and learning (pronunciation and accent, class discussions in silence and etc.), social isolation (loss of social network, differences in preferred style of learning in peer group and etc.), cultural norms (classroom interactions between teachers and students, academic norms and etc.).

Museus (2014) Culturaly Enganging Campus Environments (CECE) theoretical model is grounded by Tinto (1975, 1987, 1993) theory. The CECE model posits that a variety of external influences (i.e., finances, employment, family influences) shape individual influences (i.e., sense of belonging, academic dispositions, and academic performance) and success among racially diverse college student populations. The model also suggests that students enter higher education with precollege inputs (i.e., demographic characteristics, initial academic dispositions, academic preparation) that influence individual influences and success. The focal point of the model underscores the environmental (i.e. culturally engaging campus environments) and individual influences on college success. Specifically, the focal area of the model suggests that the degree to which culturally engaging campus environments exist at a particular postsecondary institution is positively associated with more positive individual factors and ultimately greater student success.

A number of studies have also been conducted on the adaptation of foreign students studying in Lithuania (Razgulin, Smigelskas, Argustaite-Zailskiene, 2021; Grebliauskiene, 2019, Gudaityte et al. 2014). Also, it was analyzed student attitudes towards learning space (classroom) environment created at specialized biomedical university by Eidimtas, Bruneviciute, Blazeviciene (2018). However, factors, circumstances, perhaps direct facts, that allow teachers to recognize other forms of diversity in Higher Education (HE) which was impacted by learner's earlier educational culture, were not examined.

The aim of this research is to reveal the possibilities to recognize other forms of diversity in learning environments in Higher Education

The objectives of the research were the following: 1) To analyze the expectations of first year students to the learning environment; 2) To reveal key elements of other forms of diversity in learning environments in HE.

This self-study of our practice as teacher educators explores a graduate course focused on inclusive pedagogy and teacher professionalism involving an ethical and social commitment to all students. The purpose of this research is to find new ways to work with teacher students through reviewing their learning processes. The aim is to understand key learning moments witnessed in students’ self-assessment papers and how we can build on those to further support students in their learning. The research question is: What are the different ways of learning that students report in their self-assessment?

Inclusion can be realized when teachers see themselves as agents of change, with the values, knowledge and attitudes that allow every student to succeed (UNESCO, 2020). An essential element of inclusive education involves ensuring that all teachers are prepared to teach all students. Inclusion implies a shift from emphasizing the source of learning differences or difficulties in school as coming from within the pupil or from their social circumstances to viewing the problem as the influence of the system of education or the environment (Schuelka et al., 2019). School is then a place where difference is understood as fundamental to human development and the aim is to create rich learning environments for all students through differentiation, focusing on what is to be taught rather than who is to learn it (Óskarsdóttir et al., 2018). So, rather than expecting pupils to assimilate to existing school and subject structures, the curricula, teaching practices and learning situations must mirror the inherently diverse human nature.

Teaching for equity, where teaching practices that presume diversity from the beginning are employed and built on a recognition of pupil resources, can be considered simply as good teaching for all. These connotations of inclusion challenge all teachers to investigate their values and beliefs, to reflect on their understanding of teaching, learning and curriculum, and to reinvent their roles as participants in school change. Through the recognition of their identities, their unique qualities and their roles, teachers have more opportunities to empower their pupils. In working with diverse pupils, it is critical that teachers understand how their own identities influence the ways they work and how they respect the value of diverse identities (Freire, 2005).

Teaching people to become responsive teachers in inclusive settings is not straightforward because people do not necessarily refer to their own experience of diverse classrooms. It can be demanding to create a learning environment of trust, collaboration and problem solving, as reconstructing thinking, beliefs and learning takes time (Guðjónsdóttir & Óskarsdóttir, 2023). It can be challenging, both for participants and teacher educators, to move out of the comfort zone, risk uncertainty and explore new ways of planning, teaching, and learning. However, previous research in teacher education reports that most participants were comfortable with the various learning environments provided (Guðjónsdóttir & Óskarsdóttir, 2020).

Feedback to students is a key element in learning to become responsive teacher in inclusive settings. Formative assessment can influence future performance and provide information from feedback that improves learning (Black & Wiliam, 2009). It is a planned, ongoing process that can be used by students and teachers to elicit and use evidence of student learning to improve their progress in achieving intended learning outcomes (CCSSO, 2018). Thus, formative assessment is a method teachers can use to improve instruction and impact the teaching-learning process aiming to enhance students’ understanding of their own learning and to give them an opportunity to influence their learning (Brookhart, 2013).

As the field of international student mobility (ISM) research develops, it is becoming more and more obvious that there is a lack of a theoretical framework that would encompass different disciplinary contributions and bare a coherent explanatory power for often contradictory empirical findings. The great disparity emerges when the research is done into individual decision-making as opposed to general international student flows as more variables inevitably are drawn into consideration and human agency starts to manifest. Despite acknowledged and well-researched influences of macro-level push and pull factors shaping ISM, students make agentic decisions to take part in mobility on an individual micro level. To investigate these decisions the research needs to account for “students' visions of the past, their perceptions of the present and their ambitions about the future” which are fluid and subjective (Wells, 2014, p.22).

Despite the apparent contradictions in research on ISM participation and decision-making, it is, nevertheless, possible to create a Meta-Framework based on the complementary nature of various paradigmatic and disciplinary approaches and their convergence potential. The theorised Meta-Framework of ISM decision-making builds upon previous applications to ISM of Rational Choice model (Lörz, Netz, & Quast, 2016), Rubicon Model of Action Phases (Netz, 2015), Theory of Planned behaviour (Kim & Lawrence, 2021; Albien & Mashatola, 2021; Goel, de Jong, & Schusenberg, 2010, 2012; Presley et al., 2010; Petzold & Moog, 2018; ) and Self-determination theory (Chirkov et al, 2007; Yue & Lu, 2022) combined with studies on push-pull factors across various contexts, research on the effect of personality traits and the recently theorised overarching theory of migration – Aspiration-Capability Framework - proposed by de Hass (2021)

Until recently due to the plethora of factors affecting individual ISM decisions, testing the validity of such Meta-Framework would be very difficult, if not impossible. IaD allows us to assess the decision-making process of those involved in the absence of the most prominent barriers to participation, such as financial, academic, and familial. Most importantly it gives us an opportunity to explore the changes evoked by purely educational international experience (stripped of country immersion components) and how these changes alter aspirations for studying abroad as a transition into another educational culture before all.

It is generally believed that a physical study abroad period enhances future mobility aspirations (e.g. Findlay et al., 2006; Wiers-Jenssen, 2008). Lee et al. (2022) found that those students who have participated in international virtual exchange (a type of Internationalisation at a Distance (IaD)) are twice more likely to take part in immersive study abroad. However, the authors acknowledge that the correlation can take different forms, with either study abroad intentions leading to engagement with IaD opportunities, or vice versa, showing how the two are bound together on the motivational level.

The research questions are, thus, the following:

1. How does motivation for IaD participation differ from motivation for physical student mobility, if any?
2. How does IaD participation affect consequent aspirations for cross-border immersive study abroad?
3. What is a possible mechanism behind such influence as an overarching model of ISM decision-making?

The outcomes of this research are likely to make a substantial contribution to both theory and practice. Apart from proposing a more universal theory of individual decision-making in ISM that has the potential to erase contradictions among existing empirical findings, it allows distinguishing between students whose disengagement with studies abroad is a well-weighted rational decision, a product of existing constraints, or an overseen opportunity due to limited vision.

Educationalists across the globe face ever-increasing pressure to reform and improve schooling (Kalenze, 2014). But they regularly struggle to implement and sustain these changes as intended (Fullan, 2007; Hallinger & Heck, 2011). This is not particularly surprising: educational change, as with all behavioral change, is neither linear nor externally controllable. It is a process of differential enactment based on a myriad of individual and collective psychosocial processes, which theorists often term “sensemaking” (Brown et al., 2015).

Diverse literatures, from organizational psychology to learning science, adopt a cognitive lens to describe and explain this complexity. More specifically, scholars often highlight the power of individual beliefs (Ajzen, 2005) and perceptions (Smith, 2001) in shaping behavior change. That is, the ways in which actors conceptualize and assess external phenomena essentially direct their decisions to adopt or alter all manner of actions (George & Jones, 2001). Education researchers, in particular, have long demonstrated that teachers’ pedagogical beliefs shape not only their classroom behaviors (Raths, 2001), but also their approaches to novel reforms (Fives & Buehl, 2016). They have further shown that students’ educational conceptions inform all manner of pedagogical decisions, from engagement and motivation (Könings, 2007) to learning approach (Dart et al., 2000).

However, the nature of and interrelations between belief and perception are underexplored in the context of educational change. First, empirical studies have rarely aimed to link these cognitive constructs with actual changes at the heart of teaching and learning—classroom-level pedagogical practices (Fives & Gill, 2015). Second, researchers have rarely collected longitudinal data on these shifting concepts (Wiltsey Stirman et al., 2012). Third, studies on educational change tend to either assess only a handful of qualitative cases, or reduce data down to average beliefs across a diversity of actors (Zhang & Soergel, 2014). Finally, studies generally overlook the classroom-shaping power of students’ cognitive processes, particularly as they interact with teachers’ shifting beliefs and practices (Hilgendorf, 2012). Taken together, these traditionally static, non-agentic snapshots complicate a detailed understanding of the complex cognitive mechanisms underpinning educational change.

This study adopts a multi-case, mixed methods, longitudinal approach to bridge these gaps. It seeks to build a theoretical model of individual pedagogical belief, perception, and behavior change, answering three interrelated questions:

• How do schooling beliefs, reform perceptions, and pedagogical practices change over time for individual teachers and students?

• What types of teacher and student profiles emerge from analysis of their schooling beliefs, reform perceptions, and pedagogical change?

• To what extent do schooling beliefs and reform perceptions relate to pedagogical change, for individual teachers and students?

Set in the context of public education reform in Sao Paulo, Brazil, this project analyzes the shifting beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors of students and teachers across five upper-primary schools implementing a government-led reform known as Ensino Integral. This “whole education” reform aims to not only double the school day from four to eight hours, but also shift pedagogy toward student-centered, hands-on, and contextualized learning (Diretrizes do Programa Ensino Integral, 2016).

All networks hold a meeting during ECER. All interested are welcome.

In spite of EU endeavor to promote peace and intercultural dialogue unfortunately, a number of anti-European movements, nationalist and populist – both at the far right and at the far left of the political spectrum – have recently emerged in Europe. These voices which despise the values and rights that characterize the EU, and this contempt and violation of EU values and rights tends to affect more those individuals belonging to minorities. On the contrary, Cultural diversity is conceived as a value of the Union, worthy of all respect. Furthermore, the prohibition of all forms of discrimination is enshrined in the first paragraph of Article 21 of the CFR: “Any discrimination based on any ground such as sex, race, color, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation shall be prohibited.” That is why both academic and civil society should strive to foster Cultural Diversity as an asset and promote dialogue understating and democratic principles in EU societies. Both scholars and politicians insist on the need to prepare society to deal with the challenges that cultural diversity, and globalization present to the development of a sense of a cohesive community (Castles & Miller, 993). Education has a pivotal role to play in meeting the 2030 agenda In a European society which is increasingly multi-cultural and pluralistic, social cohesion and inclusion is a fundamental pre-requisite for growth, and sustainability.

Since the memory of Holocaust covers the educational challenges in a multi-cultural setting in Europe, the Arabic and Muslim reception of it impacts the process of teaching. The learners’ reception engages hostile and resistant representations and attitudes, educators in Europe and the Mediterranean contexts are more and more faced by the claim for an ethical unworthiness based on the religious and cultural background, therefore, new tools of pedagogic intervening are requested to insure the correspondence between the European agreement upon human rights teaching and the practices of humanitarian remembrance

The suggested symposium brings together scholars from three countries which will critically discuss thorugh their contributions different epistemological and pedagogical approaches towards the engagement of students in the process of identity and culture negotiations in educational settings in the context of Shoah Teaching and learning. This panel will bring together scholars form Israel, Morocco and Spain who will examine comparatively in what way Shoah education contributes to the development of a critical understainig of social justice related issues . They will also reflect on the ethical dimenstion of this approach to teacher education and will explore teh new concept developed by Prof Gross "Reflective Culture of Holocaust Remembrance". The concept was developed as a grounded theory concept and as an integral part of class observations during the research and the researcher active and reflective interventions iProf Gross attended.

The collective memory of the Holocaust is shaped through direct and indirect actions in Israel and abroad. The Israeli government decided that national Holocaust Remembrance Day would also be considered a day to combat racism and anti-Semitism. The United Nations determined that January 27, the day the Auschwitz camp was liberated from the Nazis in 1945, is World Holocaust Remembrance Day. The remembrance of the Holocaust will always be a call against anti-Semitism, racism, neo-Nazism, prejudice, and intolerance.

The Holocaust is a central issue in Israeli education systems. Every educational framework is required to adapt the learning methods, the teaching contents, and the nature of the insights and meanings to the age of the children. Learning about the Holocaust usually takes place near Holocaust Remembrance Day and Heroism. The lessons are planned and are suitable for this topic and often include participating in a traditional ceremony, watching a film, listening to survivors' testimonies, and more (Cohen, 2010; Fieldman, 2009). The education system is faced with tensions arising from the dilemma between the importance of acquiring Holocaust knowledge and preserving cultural memory and dealing with complex content of death and survival that are unbearably difficult.

In Holocaust literature, the reader is exposed to multiple voices and complex content and examines moral issues and still has the power to help process content following trauma, fear, and pain (Harshav, 2000; Erll, 2011, 2020; Graff, & Shimek, 2020).

Literature lessons are based on close reading to consolidate readers' responses which adapt the meanings of the plot to their personal experiences (Dias & Hayhoe, 1988). Usually, the teachers address the children with questions that require a deliberate and known answer in advance, and the interpretive discourse is structured and focused. The writing tasks accompanying the reading are also identical in purpose to the questions given in the classroom discussion. Mostly, they are close to the plot and aimed at understanding and revisiting the story's meanings (Elkad-Lehman, & Bar-on, 2022; Fisher; & Nancy, 2012; Newkirk, 2011).

This study examines an innovative method of teaching and learning about the Holocaust. The diversity in teaching and learning is via a different unusual lesson plan of writing a 'Journal Diary' while reading Holocaust literature. A diary is a genre that allows one to write without considering readers or attracting their attention. This writing requires an open communication channel between the addressee (the child/student) and the recipient (the teacher/instructor/parent/peer) in an atmosphere of trust, confidence, and inclusion. The diary can involve the children's lives and motivate them in the future. Writing an emotional 'Journey Diary' in Holocaust literature lessons is a diversity in the conservative teaching method. That encourages examining fundamental questions of human behavior and taking a stand and decision. Both partners, the writer, and the reader are invited into emotional and moral involvement. Open discussion strengthens the children's ability, and personal writing makes the study topics relevant to their lives. Studies indicate that writing a diary contributes to the ability to write a text and examine methods of teaching and learning (Yüce, 2020; Supiani, 2016; Yuliani, & Fitriana, 2017).

The purpose of the study is to examine the contribution of an innovative teaching method: writing a personal 'Journey Diary' continuously while reading Holocaust literature as part of the program 'What read there?' in elementary school.

The study questions are: (1) What are the challenges and actions in teaching-learning the program 'What read there?' in elementary school? (2) How does continuously writing a 'Journey Diary' help process interpretation and create personal insights, values, and identity?

The perception of »our« history is of great importance for our self-images and relations with »others«. Too long, common European history has been told under nationalistic aspects and respective »others« have been perceived as a threat due to unresolved historical conflicts and the transmission of unquestioned stereotypes. In times of increasing social plurality in European societies, it is appropriate to work on a transnational understanding of mutual history in order to dissolve the inhibiting past. This presentation introduces a scientific project of "Dialogical Remembering", which brings together teachers, history didacticians, historians and representatives of civil society organisations to review curricula and history textbooks in Austria, Slovenia and Italy with regard to the teaching of common history. Nationalist and exclusive views as well as "good practice" have ben examined. In international working groups and school tandems, new and inclusive ways of teaching about the common history of „Alps-Adriatic-border region” between Austria, Italy and Slovenia have been developed. It has also been examined whether and how the history shared by the "autochthonous" population groups can be connected to newly arrived members of the societies, where there are possibilities for connecting to supra-regionally relevant topics and possibilities for conveying belonging. Common, multi-perspective materials for school lessons in Austria, Slovenia and Italy, which make people aware of the opportunities of a common heritage in the Alps-Adriatic region, rounded off this pilot project. Conflicts were notleft out, but different perspectives and narratives have been juxtaposed and have been made visible: different narratives can coexist without having to relativise each other. In this way, empathy for the point of view of the "others" can develop, trust and insight can grow and thus an important step towards an inclusive society can be taken. In this lecture, the methodology of the project will be presented and the underlying considerations regarding a dialogical remembering will be explained. Examples will be given of how multi-perspectivity can be achieved in dealing with the common past.

The immigrant presence is neither a novelty nor a passing phenomenon. Children, even more than their parents, are an important element not only in Italian schools but in society in general, albeit the educational environment has difficulty in distinguishing between these young people (all Italian) and their parents (resulting from one or more migrations). As they come of age, the young people continue to go through a delicate phase subsequent upon compulsory schooling and to enter the labour market, discovering the extent to which being foreigners and ‘children of immigrants’ means being negatively labelled (Ambrosini 2019; Ricucci 2017).

Reaching adulthood – i.e. the steps which are considered as the passage between being ‘young’ and being ‘adult’ – happens more quickly for the second generation than for their Italian peers (Argentin and Pavolini 2020; Panichella, Avola and Piccitto 2021). From this perspective, the second generation represents a novelty within the so-called Mediterranean transition to adulthood in which Italy fits. However, this awareness is not widespread. Indeed, the issue of the second generation emerges mainly when studying the educational path from infancy to high school. Rarely does the focus span the university level and the relationship with the labour market. Looking at these two latter topics, emigration flows from Italy to other EU or OECD countries represent one of the more interesting patterns of social transformation in the debate on youth. However, despite the high numbers and the relevance in public debate, the phenomenon of young people with a migratory background who decide to leave Italy remains quite under-scrutinised, with the great majority of research focusing only on Italians with an Italian family background.

The paper will present finding from a broaden research project focussed on the topic of youth intra-EU mobility. Specifically, the project addressed the perspectives of a very particular group of young people – those who have a family (or personal) migratory background and who have developed migration projects from Southern European countries to Northern Europe.

The paper will start by framing the issue of youth mobility and its connection with international family migratory experiences before presenting the main actors, namely the children of immigrants in Italy who – with or without Italian citizenship – decide to leave the country. The reasons behind this decision are numerous. In this paper, the focus will be on the lack of supports and the discriminations which seems to characterize the relations with both university enrolment and entry in the labour market and finally force young people with a migratory background to leave the country. The research question will try to better understand to what extent peers and those who belong to the educational community will help (or not) these specific young people in try to overcome discrimination episodes and avoid the risk to leave the country not as a free choice but as a reaction towards an unwelcome society.

Decades of research have demonstrated that friendship is a crucial human ability that has important implications for learning and development processes (Hartup, 1996). Through friendship, children acquire important social skills that will be essential in other relationships later in life, such as sharing, conflict resolution, or even loyalty (Epstein, 1986). Such important abilities are rooted in the early years (Dunn, 2008).

In this regard, positive attitudes about school, academic achievement, and the development of positive self-esteem are among the most common impacts when talking about healthy peer relationships and friendships (Denham, 2006). When Osher and colleagues (2020) explore the features at the macro and micro contexts that shape children’s developing brains and their overall development, they found that having friends decrease loneliness, increases self-esteem (Osher et al., 2020). Moreover, research has shown it promotes school satisfaction and engagement, averts some victimization, and it buffers the mental health consequences of bullying (Adams, Santo, & Bukowski, 2011). This is coherent with the main findings of the Harvard Study on Adult Development (Vaillant, 2008), which conclude that one of the most important factors for a happy and healthy life is high-quality relationships.

When it comes to children, scientific literature agrees on considering children’s friendships those peer relationships that are characterized by mutual positive regard and extend beyond a specific location or context or point in time (Rose et al., 2022). Although scientific literature highlights that friendship’s foundations are rooted in the early years (Dunn, 2008), research about friendship at this stage of life continues to be scarce. Although studies about friendship focused on later stages of life shed light on this unique human capacity, understanding how children’s friendship is built and how it is conceptualized among young children might contribute to nurturing features that facilitate it from the very beginning.

Schools are an ideal context for friendships’ formation and development. In this regard, a particular school model called Schools as Learning Communities (SLC) (Soler et al., 2019) has demonstrated to enhance social cohesion and academic achievement in more than 9,000 schools worldwide and has been identified by the European Commission as being effective in reducing the school dropout rate in Europe. It is grounded on the implementation of a series of Successful Educational Actions (Flecha, 2015) that highlight the importance of interactions and community participation as key elements of educational success and social cohesion. In addition, SLC has been found to support help and solidarity interactions in the early years and nurture important human values for friendship such as love, justice, tolerance, and solidarity (García-Carrión et al., 2020). However, less research has been conducted in these schools to explore children’s friendships in early years. Consequently, this study addresses two research questions: a) what do children of 5 years old understand as being friends? And b) what school elements might support children’s friendship formation in a culturally diverse school setting?

Nowadays, Europe is facing more intensively some of the challenges and opportunities in relation to growing ethnic, cultural and religious diversities in education. Concretely, teachers in schools and universities need tools to reflect more on how societies are changing and how important is to accept diversity in all senses. From that perspective, the present research aims to analyze the impact of the Project ‘Stories that Move’ in a sample of university students from Social Education degree and their reflections to challenge racism and discrimination (Bolzman et al., 2019).

Educational contexts, schools and universities, are a fundamental socialization context for adolescent and young individuals’ personal and professional development (Eccles & Roeser, 2011). In particular, intergroup contact and cooperation in the learning process are key elements for endorsing equality and inclusion in classroom (Celeste, et al., 2019; Karataş et al., 2023) with cultural pluralism and diversities.

In this research, we understand that teachers are widely considered the primary practitioners of cultural diversity approaches (e.g., Geerlings et al., 2019; Schachner, 2019). They might improve the quality of intergroup contact not only by demonstrating to students how to interact with each other but also by acting in accordance with specific social norms. More particularly, by acting as role models for their students, teachers might create an optimal educational context by treating all students equally, encouraging cooperation among students from different ethnic groups to achieve common goals, and pacing value on ethnic and cultural diversity (Bayram Özdemir & Özdemir, 2020; Schachner et al., 2016). Thereby, teachers may create a “safe haven” (Tropp, 2021; Verschueren & Koomen, 2012) for ethnic minority and majority adolescents and young individuals to establish harmonious intergroup relationships.

In order to do that, students and teachers together need to reflect more on diversity and be more inclusive. How could we do that? There are many resources that teachers and professors could use at different educational levels. However, there is less research that analyses the impact of using specific resources and the critical thinking resulted from those resources.

Concretely, ‘Stories that Move’ is an online European toolbox for learning about anti-discrimination from different intersectional layers of diversities. It aims to contribute to intercultural historical learning encouraging young people to think about diversity and prejudice and to reflect on their own views and choices by hearing the personal stories of their peers, as well as to become socially active. The toolbox includes materials for learners and teachers, which are available in seven European languages. Until now, it has been implemented in more than 10 European countries.

From a pedagogical perspective, the tool is focused on peer education (Damon, 1984) and participatory research as effective methods for creating inclusive classrooms. One of the prerequisites for inclusive classrooms is to engage young people to be active in our societies, to contribute as citizens to democracy. And all this starts with the development of their critical thinking skills.

In addition, this tool is focused on the importance of acknowledging an individual’s social position in relation to discrimination, the blended learning and visible thinking techniques are used to support the critical thinking of students (Brookfield, 1987) to give students insight into their learning process; learning routines, such as a set of questions or a short sequence of steps. Moreover, in Stories that Move a lot of the learning takes place through talking, in pairs, small groups and classroom discussions. This helps to actively engage them and encourages the development of critical thinking skills, enabling them to reflect on the relevance of discrimination in their own lives.

In spite of policy impetus, research shows that teachers struggle to address the increasing diversity in their classrooms (PPMI, 2017)[1]. The acquisition of intercultural competence, which can be defined as the ability to mobilise and deploy relevant values, attitudes, skills and knowledge in order to interact effectively and appropriately in a culturally diverse context (Deardorff, 2009; Barrett, 2020; Shuali et al. 2020), embodies a crucial need for teachers to deal with diversity and to be successful in their teaching. In this context, in 2019 the Joint Research Centre (JRC) launched the INNO4DIV project with the aim of supporting educational policies that will support the promotion of teachers’ intercultural competence through the analysis of literature and the study of innovative good practices which have successfully overcome barriers to the development of teachers’ intercultural competence.

The conceptual framework of the INNO4DIV research project shifts from the discussion on IC towards intercultural and democratic competence (IDC). This shift represents the epistemological foundation of the INNO4DIV conceptual approach (extensively developed in Volume 1). This approach follows education scholars who, in their studies, establish the role that education and, very specifically, teachers play in the development of social identity and the construction of the sense of belonging (Dewey, 1916; Durkheim, Nisbet, 1960).

INNO4DIV research project is based on a cross case analysis of 21 cases which present outstanding outputs in overcoming barriers to IDC development in teacher education. The project reviewed initial teacher education and continuous professional development of teachers from a comprehensive approach analysing different dimensions– curriculum design, pedagogical approach and institutional discourse. The INNO4ID project also identified the CoE RFCDC competence model (2018a as the most effective approach to IDC development in both pre- and in-service teacher education. According to INNODIV conceptual framework

Teachers who practice IDC deploy skills and behaviours based on a strong commitment to the principles of social justice. They possess a complex understanding of people, empathy towards adverse situations and follow an inclusive approach to education (Byram et al., 2001).

This study provides information of innovative good practices following the classification of 9 Key Enabling Components. The aim of this research is to analyse all the data collected across the cases, extracting the relevant guidance information, organise it in an effective manner for its use by the multiple stakeholders, and validate it with relevant expert stakeholders. A great deal of information was already provided in the formal report, yet the thorough and comprehensive approach of the initial research obtained much more data than the one that which has been contemplated in the final report.

In 2013 the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Azcapotzalco Unit, México (UAM-A), was given the task of creating a multidisciplinary Program (TIM) for the Basic Sciences and Engineering Division in the ten engineering degrees. Whose mains objectives are the promotion of integral training in the students based on knowledge, skills and attitudes that enrich the interaction with their development environment (Bonilla R., P., Armadans, I., & Anguera, MT (2020).

This set proposes a triple approach to the multidisciplinary focus: a) to stablish subjects whose object of study is for definition interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary like theater, sustainability, gender studies and cultural studies in general; b) propose another subjects that provide essential skills and knowledge so that students understand their interaction in the contemporary world and recognize themselves as social and cultural actors ( Osorio Garcia, ,2012). and c) the multidisciplinary set will be the principal axis of a new educative model; each one of subjects programs must have an inter and multidisciplinary focus developed in the delivered modalities so that students could make alternative multidisciplinary proposals of solutions applied to their environment.

The didactic proposal raises the concept of education that emanates from the philosophy of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, México as a point of support; and it is taken as strategy of approach of the multidisciplinary subjects to promote students learning to search for agreement points; this can be done through student-pupil and between student and teacher relationships. The subjects have been grouped into five lines of knowledge. The first three cater to objects of study properly interdisciplinary as:

Cultural Studies ("Man and Culture").

Citizen Training ("Study of the Society and Sustainable Development").

Arts and Humanities.

Now focusing on the line of knowledge "Cultural studies" The subjects that are taught are:

¶ The landscape as an agent of settlements and culture.

¶ Family and violence in contemporary Mexico.

¶ Gender and sexuality.

¶ Power and gender.

At this point it is worth noting the definition of social stigma that refers to the attitudes and beliefs that lead people to reject, avoid or fear those who are perceived as different. Authors as Baah, F. O., Teitelman, A. M., & Riegel, B. (2019 have pointed out that it is a relational, non-essential concept, and establishes three large categories that cause social stigma: tribal (ethnicity, religion), physical differences (obesity, mental illness, etc.) and stigmas associated with behavior or personality (crime, homosexuality, etc.) Has been defined stigma as the product of a multifaceted social construction whose two main dimensions include people as risk and as responsibility. In other words, society perceives that stigmatized individuals and groups represent a risk and, at the same time, are responsible for causing it.

In the TIM unit of the UAM-A the different subjects present learning outcomes addressed to the analysis, understanding, skilling and sensitization towards all these types of violence, discriminations and psychosocial problems raised in these stigmas.

This is the context where we are applied an innovative resource, in order to prevent, fight and sensibilize against identitaria violence. This resource is the Toolkit Stories that Move, a toolkit developed by Ana Frank House, Funded by European Union, winner of WSA and Comenius Edu Media (2018)

The purposes of that study have been a) Obtaining an exploratory evaluation related to the personal positions and skills of the students related the phenomena and b) to test the implementation as educative resources the blended learning toolkit Stories that Move, developed in Europe

This contribution analyses the results of the research project "Resituando la Renovación Pedagógica (RP) en España desde una perspectiva crítica" ("Resituating Pedagogical Renewal (PR) in Spain from a critical perspective"), a three-year R&D project (PID2019-108138RB-C22) which aims to detect and analyse which elements of schools considered as renovators can be related to pedagogical renewal (hereinafter PR) at present. Specifically, two case studies are presented, focusing on two selected centres of Compulsory Secondary Education in the Autonomous Communities of Catalonia and Aragon. The aim is to contrast two levels: 1) the existence of common genealogical references and innovative practices with an emancipatory, active, participative and transformative character. The selection of these communities is due to their common past of PR and educational loans due to their proximity (Mainer, 2008; Feu, Besalú & Palaudàrias, 2021): 2) the differentiated character between the centres, taking into account that Catalan is rural and Aragonese is urban.

The term PR is shown to be a multifaceted concept linked to the sociohistorical context of the moment (Feu & Torrent, 2020; Pericacho et al. 2019), which is an indicator of the difficulty of conceptualising a term with a broad and long history in Spain. In different historical periods, the terms educational reform, innovation and pedagogical renovation have been used to refer to educational changes, although these changes were carried out at different levels. The difference lies in the origin of the change, in the objectives pursued or in the radical nature of the change, i.e. whether it entails an in-depth transformation or whether it is merely superficial and partial.
In Europe and Spain there has been a rich history of PR. Many visions have constituted a critique, even a break with the conventional-hegemonic school model. In this sense, the school has not been presented as something homogeneous and immutable over the years. It is worth highlighting the diversity of authors linked to PR approaches throughout the 20th century, such as Dewey, Freinet, Neill, Fröbel, Montessori, Claparède, Luzuriaga, Giner de los Ríos or Ferrière; the pedagogical proposals developed by Ferrer y Guardia in the Modern School; or the personalist theories of Freire and Milani, among others (Pericacho-Gómez, 2014; Torrent & Feu, 2020). Likewise, in Spain it is necessary to underline two key political moments before and after the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975) that have marked the concept: the Second Spanish Republic (1931-36) and the opening towards the democratic transition (1965-1980) (Milito & Groves, 2013; Hernández, 2018).

Thus, the concept of PR is based on different pedagogical traditions that share elements such as an integral, critical and emancipatory education, open to the environment; democratic and participatory and with a transformative vision of the teaching culture (Goodyear and Casey, 2013) and of the teaching model in all its aspects (Pericacho-Gómez, 2016).

Therefore, it is necessary to consider how current PR is related to the current socio-historical educational context (Sahlberg, 2016) and how it maintains connections with educational approaches linked to an open and critical school, based on democratic structures, encouraging the use of active methodologies, putting students at the centre of the educational process and implementing innovations such as the use of digital tools from a critical perspective (Escudero et al., 2018; Pericacho-Gómez and Andrés-Candela, 2018; Torrego and Martínez-Scott, 2018).

Globally, the number of students moving abroad for their studies has been growing (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). Similarly, the number of students participating in short-term mobility programmes such as the ERASMUS+ exchange study programme has increased. Even though, the provision of English-taught programmes in non-English speaking countries has developed the main providers of international education are still English-speaking countries like the US, Australia, and U.K. (OECD, 2016). Finland has also expanded the provision of English-taught programmes and courses (Wächter & Maiworm, 2014). This provision of English-taught programmes and courses has been a priority for years and has been methodically implemented (see internationalisation strategies from the Ministry of Education and Culture, 2001, 2009, 2017). These efforts led the number of international degree students to triple, from 6,877 in 2001 to 20,868 in 2020 (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2018, 2022a). Similarly, many students choose Finland for their exchange study period. For example, in 2021, 6,711 students came to Finland for an international mobility period of 3 months and more (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2022b).

Considering the numerous culturally diverse classrooms in higher education, it is essential for teachers to develop inclusive and responsive strategies (Larke, 2013), and implement more flexible and culturally diverse teaching methods (Leask, 2009) as students bring their own frames of reference (Hahl, 2016), expectations (Stier, 2003) at a new learning environment. Teachers should consider and utilise their prior knowledge and experiences to construct new knowledge (Biggs & Tang, 2011) as they could increase the students’ learning opportunities and influence teachers’ practices (Merriam, Caffarella & Baumgartner, 2012). Group work can be affected by “differences in communication, values, and approaches” (Reid & Garson, 2017, p.196) even though research reports that forming culturally mixed groups has a positive impact on students’ sociocultural and academic adjustment (Wang, 2012). However, simply having students culturally mixed groups may not automatically lead to intercultural interaction (Moore & Hampton, 2015). Inspired by Reid and Garson’s work (2017) this study explores how group formation influences students’ experiences of multicultural group work. The research questions are: 1) What attitudes related to group work do students have? 2) What views do students have about random group selection?

This study was conducted during a multicultural education course which included lectures and interactive seminars as well as students’ case-study presentations. The participants of this course were exchange students in their bachelor’s level studies and a few students from the master’s degree programmes (international and Finnish students). One of the tasks of this course was that the students had to prepare a presentation in groups based on a case study. The 15 case studies were written by the authors of the course book based on interviews conducted with high school students. Each case study included a high school student’s reflection on their school life, experiences, and their connection to their home/family culture. A key topic based on each teenager’s experience was also in focus such as, language and culture, stereotypes, identity, immigration, among others.

In the first session the instructor randomly divided the students into 8 teams (5 teams of 5 students, and 3 teams of 4 students). No objections were expressed by the students The students were expected to spend approximately 8 hours to read the case, discuss it withing their group and then prepare a 20-minute presentation about it. The intended learning outcome of this task was to critically discuss the case study and exchange viewpoints, develop group skills and a presentation, and identify good practices for teachers who work in culturally diverse classrooms.

Education is understood in society as a tool that serves to compensate any type of inequalities. At university it is also possible to continue educating in a holistic and integral way, taking into account the particular diversity of each student.

When addressing the concept of diversity, there are socio-educational and cultural factors that influence the complexity of its definition. Therefore, it is pertinent to analyse these factors such as the competences that are developed on in the classroom, the educational disadvantages of each student, the social exclusion of these young people, and conflict resolution, among others. In summary, it is necessary to study the factors that influence the diversity of people to generate more inclusive teaching-learning processes at any educational stage. These types of processes should be promoted with greater emphasis in Higher Education, since these studies are the ones that conclude the educational stage and connect with the labour market (Amaro, 2019). At the university level, as in other educational stages, diversity is contemplated based on adaptation, flexibility and openness in the methodology implemented in the teaching-learning process (Cano González, 2003). This attention to diversity in education is related to the concept of inclusion as a social phenomenon (Parrilla, 2002).

The development of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has become an important educational, social and political process over the last twenty years in Europe. Thus, it is important to determine if the universities have established the adequate conditions to guarantee the inclusion of all their students, as well as to identify the obstacles to their inclusion. Therefore, one of the priorities must be to remove the social exclusion that germinates as a result of attitudes and responses to the diversity of religion, race, social class, ethnicity or qualities of each person (Ainscow, 2017). For this reason, Hernández and Ainscow (2020) propose a guide for inclusive learning in Higher Education, adapting the Index for inclusion document, originally created for schools, to the demands of the university. Therefore, the application of a teaching methodology based on the diversity of the students during the teaching-learning process can imply for them a greater inclusion in the society.

Denson and Bowman (2013) concluded that diversity and inclusion embodied in academic programs contribute positively to the development of attitudes of participation in social action, self-efficacy in learning and work, understanding intergroup, civic commitment and acquisition of competences. These competences reflected in the curricular programs of university degrees were considered key elements of university education years ago in their bid to promote employability and lifelong learning (European Commission, 2003; European Community, 2007). In this way, the European Commission (2007) drew up a list of general competences classified as Key Competences for Lifelong Learning in the European Reference Framework of 2004 with which it was possible to learn continuously and graduates could adapt to a greater extent to changes in the work context in which they intend to work. These types of competences are considered a basic tool that contribute to making undergraduate students more employable in a globalized and diverse society influenced by international relations at work.

The main purpose of this study was to analyze how the terms of inclusion and diversity are included in Higher Education through the descriptions of the competences included in the degree programs of Early Childhood Education and Primary Teaching in two universities.