The Polish Rectors Foundation has joined the consortium of the 3-year AGILE project, which will be implemented as part of the Erasmus+ program in 2022-2025.

Project Consortium

1. Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis (France) – project coordinator
2. University of Hamburg (Germany)
3. University of Ljubljana (Slovenia)
4. Kaunas Technical University (Lithuania)
5. Polish Rectors Foundation (Poland)
6. Bordeaux Montaigne University (France)
7. Web2Learn (Greece)
8. Lviv University of Technology (Ukraine)

Project background and priorities:

Building inclusive higher education systems: The AGILE project is designed to forge inclusive higher education systems that will be prepared to expand their mission in times of refugee crisis. In particular, the current Ukrainian crisis has produced a significant number of refugees right next to the EU borders. There are already European HEIs that have developed specific courses for refugees for more than ten years now (see Universite Paris 8, UH), but this is not yet a widespread practice in most European HEIs. In this challenging socio-political context, HEIs are called to assist refugee students by developing inclusive and sustainable learning curricula. To this end, we aim to implement activities to better understand and measure access, participation and completion rates of incoming refugee students. Additionally, we seek to monitor the recognition of civic engagement activities in their mainstream curriculum as well as valorize voluntary and community work in their university studies.

Rewarding excellence in learning, teaching and skills development: Our project aims to reward excellence through a series of intervention activities that will help train academic staff and students in innovative, multilingual and inclusive pedagogies. Specifically, we aim to reward refugee students, refugee graduate students and academic teachers through the release of open badges. This way, we further integrate alternative and new digital credentialing tools in HEIs while also achieving their resonance ?refugee students. In addition, we plan to train HE students and staff in developing projects that seek to foster social participation and civic engagement of refugee students through formal and informal (extra-curriculum) activities that will expand our project’s impact to wider citizens’ communities. In this way, we will promote the enrichment of HE curricula through new pedagogical designs that will directly result from our project’s activities that are based on existing learning pathways for refugee students (e.g. Diplôme Universitaire passerelle) and on creative approaches to sustainable and inclusive learning pathways.

Additionally:

-training of academics in innovative and/or online pedagogies, including trans-disciplinary approaches, new curriculum design, delivery and assessment methods linking education with research and innovation where relevant;

- fostering an entrepreneurial, open and innovative higher education sector, by promoting learning and teaching partnerships with “ and non-commercial organisations in the private sector;

Common values, civic engagement and participation:

The AGILE project emerged as an idea after the devastating news of the war in Ukraine and the immediate mobilisation of HEIs in offering learning and career opportunities to Ukrainian refugee students. In this context, HEIs’ mission to encourage critical thinking and media literacy among students as well as generate an overall individual stand and ethics in lifelong learning for the improvement of our societies, cannot be achieved without the inclusion of refugee students in their programmes. For this reason, we have built a project that focuses on the need to empower HEIs to support active citizenship and promote EU values, while answering the need of refugee students to continue their learning journey and become agents of unity and diversity in European societies.

General objective

Increase sustainability of inclusive higher education systems to address ongoing needs of refugees through social participation and recognition of skills in their learning and career pathways.

Specific objective

Sp. Obj. (1): Foster inclusive HE curricula and assess the integration of refugees in their professional and/or study field through 3-level intervention activities.

Sp. Obj. (2): Promote HEIs-society cooperation’s resilience and sustainability in refugee crisis responses through innovative digital tools and impact assessment studies.

You will find all the information regarding the project here