Newsletter - April 2021
Welcome to ITTS!
Today we would like to introduce our international project International Teachers for Tomorrow’s School – System Change as an Occasion for Intercultural School Development and Mutual Learning. This email informs you about the project, its idea and goals. If you are interested please sign up for ITTS News in order to receive news on project activities or events, new materials for teachers, schools or universities or project related news.
International immigrant teachers often face significant challenges and barriers in re-entering their profession in their new countries of residence. Therefore, the main objective of ITTS is to support the professional re-integration of international teachers through reflection and consultation materials and to collect examples and materials to show the strengths of new colleagues. In addition, the project will develop materials to address specific challenges associated with system change. This way, ITTS aims to strengthen the new colleagues as well as their schools and aims to promote a diversity-sensitive opening of schools.
On the realization of the project works a team of partners from seven countries: Belgium, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Poland, Slovenia and Turkey.
Our aims and future activities
Cultural diversity is an essential feature of European school landscapes, but the professional re-integration of international teachers, including refugee teachers, is fraught with many challenges. ITTS wants to support international teachers in a strength-oriented way and to enable schools to integrate new colleagues in the sense of an intercultural opening of schools.
Our activities focus on a transnational stocktaking, the development of an ITTS portal, the development of reflection and counselling materials as well as the integration of these contents into the universities' curricula.
If you are curious about the outputs, get it explained:
Echo of the meetings
Since the start of the project last fall, we have already held three project meetings with all the partners and started this challenging and exciting project with enthusiasm.
Unfortunately, we could not hold a "live" kick-off meeting in Bielefeld (Germany) as planned, but we still managed to hold interesting virtual meetings between November 2020 and January 2021. We had a good time getting to know each other better, discussing the first outputs, dividing tasks and discovering how different the situations and opportunities are for international teachers in each of the seven partner countries. From practice we know that kick-off meetings are crucial at the start of any project, especially when the realization of the project is determined by the constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic. We gave our best and start with a feeling of great promise!
Currently, all partners are taking a closer look at the situation of international teachers in their respective countries: What opportunities exist for the international teachers to re-enter the educational sector? What hurdles and challenges make this path more difficult? A comparative quantitative survey will follow at the end of the summer.
We are really looking forward to explore the topic further, learn from each other, share experiences and develop new materials.