International staff week 'Inclusive Mobility'

Disadvantaged students, like students from lower socio-economic backgrounds, students with disabilities or a refugee background, are underrepresented in mobility programmes. As the new Erasmus Programme aims to achieve better inclusiveness in mobility programmes, higher education institutions are in the process of planning and implementing reforms to widen participation of disadvantaged and underrepresented students in mobility programmes.

This international staff training week is aimed at training higher education staff to assess the inclusiveness of their internationalisation proccesses and to design and organise inclusive students mobilities.

Experts in the field of inclusive mobility will flagging recommendations, toolkits and case studies of good practices. Through a peer counseling approach participants will learn to assess the inclusiveness of their own institutional processes. They will be supported to draw up plans on how to overcome their specific challenges.

This staff training is supplemented by frameworks, assessment tools, case studies of good practices and toolkits that are implementable right away when back at the workplace.

Inclusive Mobility refers to creating and ensuring adequate conditions to learn, work, or volunteer abroad for people with fewer opportunities, by addressing their diverse support needs. It is a needs-based approach to what the individual beneficiary needs to ensure a safe and exciting mobility period abroad. It is important to not generalise needs, needs are specific and the individualised aspect of it is highly important.

The learning objectives of this international staff week are to:

Understand the key criteria of inclusive mobility and the related structures and approaches needed to implement a sustainable inclusive mobility strategy at institutional level
Assess the inclusiveness of institutional processes and practices and to define tactical areas for improvement (before, during and after mobility)
Understand effective strategies, corporations and resources in supporting disadvantaged students to go abroad and to make student mobilities more inclusive (before, during and after mobility)
Design an action plan to make own institutional internationalization processes and practices more inclusive
Explore networking opportunities and become acquainted with counterparts through informal job-shadowing meetings

This international staff week is an initiative of the Support Centre Inclusive Higher Education and the Office of International Policy of Artevelde University of Applied Sciences.