Adult Immigrants' Needs for Socio-Cultural Integration
Project Background

This project had its origin at a contact seminar in January, 2005. Contact seminars are organised by the European Union in order to let people meet face to face and discuss project ideas.

The original members of the idea stage were Norway, Finland, Sweden, Italy and Salamanca from Spain, together with a Greek partner that did not make it to the start of the project. After the seminar two new partners were found as replacement, an additional one from Spain and also one from Hungary.

The common ground for our organisations was to work with the education of immigrant learners. In our institutions we notice that some of these immigrants cope badly with our educational system. We are not good enough at motivating them and meeting their expectations in order for them to be integrated into society fast enough. In some cases these immigrants feel trapped in our schools since we are bad at giving them credit for the skills and knowledge they have acquired earlier. Another important factor is that the cultural understanding, from both teaching staff and immigrant learners, is not good enough to avoid problems in communication.

Through this learning partnership we aim to use introspective fieldwork in order to produce SWOT-analyses and learn from each other’s experience on good teaching practice, especially from a cultural point of view. We also want to find ways to validate prior knowledge and introduce that perspective into our institutions.