Intercultural education in practice: two pedagogical experiences with mobile students

摘要

This pedagogical paper describes and discusses a teaching activity of intercultural education for mobile students developed within the European IEREST project ( http://ierest-project.eu/). The activity '24 h Erasmus Life' aims at making students reflect on four interrelated areas of their sojourn: the emotional impact of living abroad, the understanding of how communication works within a different academic community, the broader social dimension of the experiences, and the identity-related language issues. In Autumn 2014, the activity was tested with two different groups of students by teachers at the University of Bologna ( UNIBO): the first group ( A) was formed by 18 international incoming students and was taught by face-to-face teaching in Bologna; the second group ( B) comprised 23 UNIBO students who were doing their study abroad in a variety of European countries, and participated in the activity by means of a Learning Management System. This paper traces the main instructional phases of '24 h Erasmus Life', and comments on the students' learning experiences by reporting extracts from transcribed peer-to-peer class interactions ( Group A) and from class blog and forums ( Group B). Overall, the paper aims to describe how the teaching took place in the two cases considered.