Description
Budapest Business School (BBS) is Hungary’s market leading College in business education. BBS has been teaching Intercultural Communication Courses (ICC) for many years, and in line with the school’s strategic objectives, constant methodological renewal has always been a main concern. Intercultural Communication training for local and Erasmus students is part of BBS’s 21st century skills in focus program that was awarded the European Language Label in 2013. In order to improve the students’ intercultural competences, the Institute of Languages and Communication constantly revise content and extend its methodological repertoire. The school iss particularly interested in integrating new technologies in the course. The University of Tromsø (UT) offers innovative 10-credit ICC courses, embedded in the core curriculum, and delivered in the framework of international cooperation. Issues of interculturality are included in international entrepreneurship courses too. The current project aims at teachers’ mobility: The ICC course leader at UT has offered to organise a one-week study visit (job shadowing), where teachers from BBS can observe different aspects of ICC courses at UT so that they may implement good practices at BBS. BBS is also prepared to host teachers from UT on a one-week visit, which would allow exchanging ideas and planning further cooperation, especially an ICC project for students. Hence, the students of both institutions are expected to benefit from the project outcomes.
Summary of project results
The original purpose of the project was to send and receive a total of 7 incoming and outgoing lecturers from and at the Foreign Language and Communication Department of the College of Commerce, Catering and Tourism of the Budapest Business School. The planned job-shadowing mobilities were expected to allow the observation of good practices, and to implement sustainable changes at local level, as we consider extremely important to renew our curriculum constantly, and to learn from good practices. At our Department we offer courses aimed at the development of our students’ foreign language skills (with special emphasis on LSP - Languages for Specific Purposes) and Skill Development Courses (presentation skills, intercultural communication skills). This is extremely relevant in the Hungarian context, because as many surveys show, a large number of students lack those skills highly valorised by prospective employers. An inner call for proposals was published on our institution’s homepage and the criteria for the selection of the prospective participants were: the relevance of the mobility, the adequacy with the aims of the project and with the strategic objectives of the BBS, and the expected outcomes of the mobility. We could discover during the realization of the project that our local practices were highly appreciated by incoming lecturers, therefore the European dimension of our efforts was recognized. It was also during the realization of the project that we discovered the possibility for a wider use of the EEA grants, in accordance with the needs of our educators. Lecturers from different departments and faculties showed great interest for the mobility, thus we were pleased that we were offered the possibility by the National Agency to increase the number of the mobilities. Finally 14 mobilities were carried out: 2 incoming and 10 outgoing ones. It was an important benefit that we had the possibility to include not only job-shadowing, as originally planned, but also participation in trainings (2 lecturers) and conferences (2 lecturers). A special focus was put on the dissemination of the results, as the participants were given the opportunity to share their experiences with their colleagues (face to face and online), and the two colleagues who participated in a training are planning to hold a training themselves for the department staff, in order to transfer the acquired knowledge.
Summary of bilateral results
During the project, we cooperated with 4 partners from Norway and 2 partners from Iceland. Cooperation was established in all cases via e-mail, in order to realize the mobility project made possible by the EEA grants. Among the partners, only one institution figures on our Erasmus partners’ list, but even in this case, previous cooperation was not active between the two institutions (before the realization of the current project). A preparatory visit did not take place, however, the coordinator also participated in a mobility, and in this framework she attended in March 2017 the conference “Internationalisation of education – borderless education” co-organized by our Erasmus partner, HIOA, and SIU, the National Agency of Norway. Establishing personal contact in HIOA had the immediate effect that another outgoing mobility was made possible. In this case, a colleague teaching business- and geography-related subjects at the BBS realized a job shadowing visit at the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research, part of HIOA, and could establish contact with several professionals who are specialised in his field of research (regional analysis and cross-border issues), so he could find new partners for common scientific work and publications in the future. In order to strengthen bilateral relations, we valorised all the options that allowed bilateral mobility, in cases where the first mobility made clear the prospective benefits of the job-shadowing mobility in the other way. For example in the case of the University of Tromso, the incoming mobility taking place in September 2016 made clear how much we could learn from the long distance learning system and its methodology used in the Alta Campus of the University of Tromso, therefore, an outgoing mobility took place in the next semester. A joint telecollaborative project was also set up during the first visit and carried out during the following semester. The same bilateral interest characterized the job shadowing mobility to the Holar University in Iceland. Observing local educational practices was relevant for our lecturers (one of them teaching foreign languages and communication, the other teaching hotel and hospitality subjects), as we can find in Holar the unique and prestigious Faculty of Rural Tourism. They could share experiments with local faculty staff, and their visit was followed by an incoming mobility, allowing the observation of good practices at the BBS.