Providing professionals working with migrants the right resources in order to offer better support to the migrant population is the key objective of the COTW project. In order to do so, the partnership implemented a research to identify the areas, which should be addressed by the project.
Talking to professionals and migrants themselves, four core areas have been identified for the International Handbook, which will be based on this first step.
Connecting with the local community – Building bridges of understanding
First of all, participants to the research stated that they felt very isolated and really in touch with the local community. They were not informed about local (intercultural) events and how to practice their language skills. This has been worsened by the pandemic, which prevents them from meeting locals and other foreigners at social events or sports games. They hence underlined the need to have free resources and strategies to improve their language skills in the meantime as well as to know where interesting social events, manifestations and intercultural offers in the local context were published.
Digital skills
In our fast-changing society and especially since Covid-19 hit, digital skills are necessary to actively participate in society and the digital economy. With the pandemic many jobs went online or implemented smart working or distance learning for school and university students. If digital skills had been important before, in the last couple of years they have become crucial and more and more people who do not have the adequate tools (wifi connection, digital devices etc.) nor skills are left out. It is no surprise then that this came up as an essential topic. Migrants wanted to improve their digital skills, both on a more basic level and strictly related to the use of the computer and certain programmes (e.g., Office package), but also on a more advanced level creating blogs to communicate with the world, using online banking or doing bureaucratic procedures online.
Employability
Employability has been and still is a key interest of the migrant population, in order to provide for themselves they need a job. This is also true for young migrants, who, on the contrary to many of their European peers, cannot count on their parents to support them throughout university studies or any other educational path and hence have to face this issue much earlier. Fostered by good levels of the local language and generally being in contact with them, but also a good level of digital skills, labour market inclusion seems achievable. However, the Sicilian labour market, which heavily relies on tourism, is in crises since the pandemic hit, which makes the whole situation even more complicated for everybody looking for work. In terms of employability training competences that migrants wanted to improve and knowledge that they wanted to gain included soft and entrepreneurial skills, preparing the cv and job interview training, accessing university and higher education in general as well as how to search for a job online and offline.
Best practices
From the side of the professionals came the request for a major best practice exchange. They wanted to have practical examples of methodologies, initiatives and activities that had already been successfully implemented in order to foster migrants’ competences and knowledge in the identified areas as well as to have direct exchanges with their peers on local, but also European level.
Next steps
Based on what has been discussed above, the partnership created the contents of the International Handbook, which will be finalized in spring 2022 in English and later be also available in Italian. In the meantime, partners are actively working to convert the contents into an e-learning platform, which will also be available in all partner languages and English.
About the project
COTW – Citizen of the world is a two-year project funded by the Erasmus+ programme, KA2: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices – Strategic Partnerships for adult education.
Partners
The partnership unites 3 European organizations:
- Coordinator: Vetlanda kommun (Sweden)
- Centrum demokratického vzdělávání, z. ú. (Czech Republic)
- CESIE (Italy)
Per ulteriori informazioni
Read more about COTW, visit the project website www.cotw-erasmus.com and follow us on Facebook.
Contact Paula Luise Goltzsche: paula.goltzsche@cesie.org.
