Conference Agenda

Our presentation focuses on the benefits and challenges of an international multidisciplinary research collaboration (Dusdal & Powell 2021) an Erasmus+ Key Action 2 program entitled “GlobalSense: Developing Global Sensitivity among Student-Teachers (in short, GlobalSense).” Our research group is multi-national, including members from Nantes University (France), Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), Weingarten University of Education (Germany), Free University of Brussels (Belgium) and Temple University of Philadelphia (USA). It is also multi-disciplinary in its nature, bringing together experts in sociology, civic education, global education, and learning sciences.

The research question that led the study this presentation is based on is : What are the organizational, communicative and conceptual challenges faced by an international and multidisciplinary team when working together on a politically, socially and culturally loaded topic such as global citizenship education?

Background- The objective of GlobalSense is to enable future teachers to develop their understanding of global citizenship and enhance their pedagogical practices resulting from cross-national online interactions among future educators. The theoretical premise underlying this work was that (a) preparing teachers to promote global citizenship requires them to engage with socially and politically loaded subjects in a global context; (b). Since each nation has a unique history and context the encounter with student-teachers from different countries has a learning potential; and (c) Teachers’ training cannot be limited to the transmission of academic knowledge alone but should include the development of a pedagogical awareness of and sensitivity (Hansen, 2010).

Theoretical background - As early as in the 1980s scholars attempted to point to the motivations and costs of collaboration in research (Fox & Faver 1984). The collaboration in the case of the GlobalSense project is motivated by indirect benefit concerning external goals of a political, economic or cultural nature as well as direct benefits that enable addressing transnational or global problems (Georghiou 1998:620-622) such as Global Citizenship education. The impact of context being political, ethical and economical can affect the research process. First of all, language differences complicate aspects of a collaborative study. Diverse cultural settings present unique challenges in multinational collaboration (Hooper et al. 2005 in Freshwater et al 2006) and more evidently in social research focused on politically loaded issues such as the GlobalSense project. Dusdal & Powell’s (2021) qualitative comprehensive study found that among the benefits of scientific collaboration, interviewees mentioned: Broadening knowledge, conducting comparative research, multidisciplinarity advances thinking and facilitates development of theoretical approaches and methods, etc . The motivations could be career advancement, networking and time to do multidisciplinary work among others. The challenges researchers faced: Organization and structured management of work packages and tasks, team communications and language skills, contrasting cultural and organizational expectations and norms, contrasting styles of communication (exchange of information) and work, diverse theoretical and methodological strengths and weaknesses and so on (Dusdal & Powell 2021). Regarding organizational challenges, though much of the work related to international research collaboration can be accomplished by email, telephone conference and video-conference, the literature emphasises the importance of face-to-face meetings (Hooper et al., 2005 in Freshwater et al 2006). The role of diversity and respect can be accommodating differences in order to facilitate a consensus approach to decision-making (Freshwater et al 2006).

As we know, collaborative European projects are very interesting platforms for the exchange of knowledge and best practices, as well as strong opportunities to understand why other approaches and solutions may benefit different circumstances. But as anyone who has taken part in such projects knows, the very same characteristics that create these exceptionally fertile circumstances, at times also make it particularly difficult to continuously and sustainably deliver high quality products. This is especially the case when partners are new to each other or to the Erasmus protocols, and the different focus points or expectations between partners reach the level where they overshadow the gains of the exchange and significantly slow down the planned process or systematically lower the quality of what is produced. However, it is paramount to safeguard the quality of the final products because, even though professional international exchange and strengthening one’s skills in collaboration are important goals indeed, the goal to deliver strong work, such that it may raise all our practices, always remains at the forefront of our aims.

Here we share our experience with monitoring the quality of an ongoing Teacher Academy project for Erasmus+. We describe the start of the project, our development of the quality monitoring system fitting the circumstances and educational and collaborative principles, and our continuous safeguarding of quality. We reflect on the process and the outcomes (e.g. the quality reports).

To contextualize our approach, we want to bring your attention to the fact that when an Erasmus+ partnership is forged between various educational institutions in different countries, the proposal that is to bind their efforts has a central issue that serves to focus the proposal as well as the partnership. It is true that it serves, as quoted in the call for proposals for this conference, as a ‘glue’ for the various partners. However, such a partnership between educational institutions, always has another issue to deal with, regardless of the ideas in the proposal, and that is the inevitable difference between their educational practices, and possibly philosophies, and how these shape their goals and expectations for collaboration and co-creation. This is relevant insofar as the educational principles any institution practices in educating its students match the ones they use in their own learning and development, and when cooperating with other learners for said development. In short, if the various partners practice what they preach, and they preach different things, the cooperation inevitably faces an extra challenge, and a profound one to boot. Our team set out to turn this into an opportunity. We as educators in a teacher training program that is explicitly veered towards establishing lifelong learning skills in our teacher-trainees, advocate a strong alignment between our own educational practices and our approach to collaborative efforts to learn and build together within an Erasmus+ partnership, in line with the latter framework’s aims for the collaborations it wishes to foster (cf. key action 2 and 3 of the Erasmus+ program.

Faced with the fascinating opportunities this type of partnership entailed, we took some time to look more closely at the situation and performed desk research to acquaint ourselves with the general approach to Quality Assurance. We then decided to introduce an alternative approach based on our own educational philosophies and practices to help sustain motivation and keep management from overextending. We developed our method and introduced it at the first physical meeting, where we walked our partners through the designed method, asked for their consent, and then started up the process the same day to ensure ad hoc support.