Validating Integration Competences of refugees
In May, the German National Agency invited the VIC team to contribute with an article to the EPALE’s thematic focus for June “Assessing adults’ skills”. The article highlights major findings from the first research phase, gives an overview of the envisaged training course for adult educators, and explains the guiding principle for the further development work.
You can find our article here.
The second newsletter provides information on the validation system LEVEL that will be used in the context of the project. LEVEL5 will be one of the main elements of our VIC blended learning offer that will be available in autumn 2018.
VIC aims to validate integration competences of refugees and the impact of integration programmes.
In order to understand the scope of European integration activities for refugees across Europe the VIC partners firstly carried out a survey on existing integration programmes in different European member states.
The results show that most of these programmes relate to linguistic and certain formal citizenship topics. In many cases, there is neither a description of the objectives of the integration programme nor a clear description of the aspired competences within these courses. Therefore, it is very difficult to derive a common definition of what “integration” actually means in each of the courses.
The VIC Team is happy to release its first newsletter describing the initial activities in the project – such as finding a common definition of integration competence as basis for establishing a competence oriented learning and validation approach that can be implemented in integration and language courses for migrants and refugees.
Find out more here.
VIC will develop an approach to measure the effectiveness of the educational offers that have been put in place to ease immigrants’ pathways to integration, on the one hand, and to assess their impact on the individual integration competences of the immigrants, on the other hand. Hence the project is focusing on the validation of integration competences.
VIC will develop a validation system for this purpose which is based on the LEVEL5 approach. LEVEL5 is a unique system to validate competences and competence developments and to create learning environments and pathways in non-formal and informal learning contexts.
VIC has officially started in December 2017 with a first partner meeting in Bonn, Germany.
The two-day meeting served to get to know the project and the involved staff members and to plan in further detail the next steps. Currently, the partners are exploring existing integration programmes in their countries in order to destil from them an operational working definition of “integration competence” as basis for the development of the VIC validation approach.