25 and 29 May, 11 June 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic that violently hit the whole European continent forced Desinc Live’s working group to reorganise its activities. The closure of the borders and the interruption of all flights to foreign countries made it impossible for the second short-term joint staff training, initially scheduled for April 2020 in Berlin, to actually take place. Therefore, in March and April 2020 all partners cooperated to find a solution and partially reschedule the activities on a remote basis. This led to the organization of three online sessions between May and June, using the Google Meets and Miro platforms, which would allow for progress in the design of the educational offer and prevent the complete halt of the process. The following summary outlines the content of the three days.
Remote meeting #1 – May 25th, 2020
The first the meeting was dedicated to two fundamental themes. After the initial greetings and the summary of the agenda, the civil society organisations that are partners of the project described their experiences during the Covid-19 epidemic and their efforts to support activities at a time when social distancing made it very difficult to work closely with people. Refugees Welcome Italia and S27 benefited from the use of virtual tools in the continuation of their operations, allowing the people they work with (mainly, refugees and asylum seekers) not to remain isolated or feel abandoned.
Afterwards, the partner from the University of Sheffield summarised what had been done so far with regard to the educational offer. She listed the results already achieved and described how much remained to be determined. It was confirmed that the didactic experimentation will be based on a blended experience, part live and part remote, which will unfold between February and June 2021. The programme will involve eighteen learners from each of the partner institutions, who, before meeting in two live workshops lasting seven days each, will work together to familiarise with each other.
Some central elements in the project had been decided during the short-term joint staff training held in Milan in January 2020. On that occasion, the partners had reached an agreement on some issues prior to the structuring of the educational offer. A common vision on learning had been discussed and a shared definition drawn up; the learning aims of the educational project had been discussed and redefined thanks to the participation of all partners; expected outcomes and topics covered by the course were defined during the January days. The profiles of potential learners were drawn up; this is the point from where the discussion restarted.
The objective of the first meeting was therefore to start defining the course structure and finding a common ground based on the profile of potential learners. Some of them are in fact asylum seekers and refugees, who may not be able to participate in the whole process from February to June 2021. The work team therefore discussed how to organise workshops that would be able to meet requests for shorter training periods without compromising the overall coherence of the educational offer. This can be done thanks to the blended nature of the training offer, which, by mixing remote activities with live appointments, can allow people to access different stages of the process.
Remote meeting #2 – May 29th, 2020
The second meeting saw the continuation of the discussion on the general structure of the educational offer, while also devoting time to discuss how the two live workshops in Milan and Berlin could be organised.
The first part of the session was dedicated to the live workshop in Berlin. First, S27 illustrated its working approach through the description of Stadtwerke, a project under development. The project is implemented in a peripheral area of the city, Marzahn, characterised by strong functional segregation and the presence of sites with different functions that receive a diverse population: industrial and residential areas, a cemetery, a camp for refugees and homeless people, etc. The refugee camp is currently home to 550 people coming mainly from Moldavia, Eritrea, and Afghanistan. Many minors live there who are not really connected to cooperation partners in the district. The first step will be setting up a container with infrastructure (water, electricity) right in front of the homeless/refugee camp, to then realise workshops (mainly of art and craftmanship) whose main goal is to cut the boundaries between residential and industrial sides. The educational methodologies adopted, which will be replicated in the live workshop in Berlin, are Situating, Engaging, Envisioning, Communicating, and many more. Each of these methodologies have already been jointly discussed and analised by the partner institutions.
Subsequently, Katharina from KU Leuven presented the general structure of the Berlin workshop, which tries to answer the questions that emerged during the first meeting about the coherence between short, medium and long-term training needs. The team assumed that the activities will start already in autumn 2020 to set the scene through on-site actions both in Marzahn and the other districts of the city selected for the educational offer. In the group’s hypothesis, both the second short-term joint staff training and the live workshop in spring 2021 would therefore be part of a wider training framework in which different players come into the game at different times.
In the second part of the meeting, the team formed by Polimi and Refugees Welcome Italia introduced the partners to their proposal for the live workshop in Milan, as well as a second general hypothesis about the blended experience and the whole educational offer. Initially, the group wished to reiterate the cornerstones of a common vision on learning, according to which, the various methodologies used, the topics and the structure of the educational offer should not be considered as purely phases in a linear process, but as a more complex circular experience of learning in (and with) the city where there is no hierarchical relationship among its elements. The online activities and the two live workshops are therefore part of the same multidisciplinary experience of mutual learning. Knowledge is not handed down from teachers to learners; rather, it is produced in the relationship between them and with the local players themselves.
Finally, the Group formed by Polimi and Refugees Welcome Italia presented their hypothesis on the workshop to be held in Milan and introduced a proposal for the more general structure of the training experience. The territories at the center of the live workshop will be peripheral neighborhoods characterised by public housing, strong presence of foreign population, similar housing problems but also a careful presence of local actors (e.g., NGOs, associations, and neighborhood committees). The themes at the heart of the workshop will be non-mainstream representations of these realities, mapping the territory in search of emerging phenomena (especially following the Covid-19 epidemic), co-designing with local realities and co-producing knowledge and change.
The structure of the overall educational process is made of online and live components:
- Community building (learners + teachers);
- Topics/themes (MOOC, case studies, seminars…);
- Exploring the contexts (tours, interviews, networks…);
- Evaluating & monitoring (expectations, feedbacks…);
- Live Workshops;
- Local and live activities.
Remote meeting #3 – June 11th, 2020
During the third remote meeting three topics were discussed: the structure of the blended experience, the monitoring and evaluation system used for the educational process, and the structure of the Digital L&T Toolbox.
First of all, the partners took up and deepened the issue of the structure of blended mobility, mainly referring to the different needs of the learners who will be involved in the process. All agreed with what was presented during the second remote meeting, even those who generally use a different approach to training experiences. The importance of modelling this proposal on learners’ profiles was stressed, and for this reason it was decided that the institution responsible for the first Intellectual Output will hold remote discussions with the respective teams.
The colleagues from KU Leuven then introduced a proposal for the monitoring and evaluation system. The guiding principle is that of self-reflection, exercised along the educational path. The system should allow all partners to immediately grasp the strengths and weaknesses of the educational offer and, possibly, change what does not work. In this system, the learners involved will not simply be “evaluators” but will participate in the generation of the criteria used to monitor and evaluate the educational offer. Some questions remain open: will the discussions on the M&E process take place at the level of the whole group of learners and teachers, or in subgroups? And how will these moments of reflection be organised? How will learners be involved in the process? This is a complex but intriguing challenge, because it is very innovative compared to what generally happens in academia, where the evaluation system is often nothing more than a bureaucratic issue. Again, the institution responsible for this action will organise meetings with individual teams to advance the reflection.
Finally, after a short break, the Polimi team presented a potential structure for the Digital L&T Toolbox, one of the virtual platforms that will be used during the educational offer. The Toolbox will have a triple function: supporting the educational process, serving as an archive of materials produced and collected through research, and acting as the legacy of the project when it will be closed.
The vision on the Toolbox, that is what we imagine it should be, is undoubtedly a vital component of this reflection because it is preparatory to any hypothesis about its structure. In the vision of all partners, the Toolbox should be:
- a methodological support for educational initiatives on inclusion etc, promoting the DESINC pedagogic approach;
- a multimedia toolkit for learning (target: autonomous learners and organised classrooms;
- a reference database on projects/bodies/institutions working on inclusion, cities, and displaced people;
- a portal on and for research, collecting diverse references and resources on inclusion, cities, displacement, and migration.
The structure will favour the navigation of the course contents, which will then be present in the landing page of the site. Each topic page will have a system of filters for searching specific materials, while pages dedicated to the didactical methods will be available in a separate section. After a discussion focused on the contribution that each partner can provide to the Toolbox and the levels of accessibility to the site by the various users, the third remote meeting comes to an end.