After the arrival of hundreds of thousands refugees in the past two years, Europe is now faced with the task to integrate those refugee immigrants with a legal title to stay. In main entry countries (Greece, Italy) and major host countries (Germany, Austria, France) there are a number of different educational offers in place which aim at easing immigrants’ pathways to integration into the labour market and society in large: vocational qualification assessment programmes, language courses, European value and integration courses, general labour market qualification, orientation and insertion programmes, informal counselling and support centres, refugee volunteering schemes. They all aim at increasing the competence of refugee immigrants to integrate into the European host societies. But there is no common, precise and operationalized definition of this “integration competence”. Nor are the effectiveness of the integration programmes measured or their impact on the individual integration competence assessed. This is the starting point of VIC, which aims to - Collect the varying objectives of integration programmes across Europe and distil from them an operational working definition of “integration competence” - Provide adult educators working with refugee immigrants with tools to promote, plan, actively develop and validate integration competences among the target group - Implement these tools in various different types of educational programmes as listed above - Carefully evaluate their feasibility, adequacy and impact A competence validation approach is for the first time applied to the target group of refugee immigrants. It can be a valuable contribution to the self-assessment and further individual competence development of refugee immigrants. The identification and recognition of competencies acquired in different types of integration measures help refugees to reflect on their competences in terms of integrating into the society and being an active citizen. It can help them become more active as they will understand what this can mean. In addition, the individual support of the final beneficiaries provides valuable support for people who might not have any social networks. Through the VIC system, refugee immigrants will get receive more systematic and better support of their integration competence development, and a certification which may help in the labour market on the one hand, and certainly boost their confidence and motivation for integration on the other hand. VIC does not have to start from scratch but can build on solid and valuable experiences gained with a scientifically developed competence validation methodology: The LEVEL5 system, which is based on a three-dimensional model which maps the development of: • Knowledge (-> cognitions) • Skills (-> actions) and • Attitudes (-> emotions and values) along five quality levels – from beginner to competent expert. In VIC LEVEL5 will be adapted to the specific needs of integration competence development. VIC does not only create added value for the refugee immigrants. In addition, adult education providers, state agencies and NGOs doing educational work with the refugees will get an assessment methodology which makes the impact of their programmes visible and thus helps to account for efficient spending of taxpayers’ and money and private donations. Outcomes of the validation can also be used to make existing integration measures more suitable in order to promote the integration process in an optimal way. The core outputs to be produced by the VIC project are: - A research report, collecting and comparing the objectives, structure and content of existing integration measures for refugees in the participating countries and best practice in competence validation - A competence framework, defining “integration competence and tailoring the LEVEL5 system to the promotion and validation of that competence - A blended learning course for adult educators on the VIC approach - A feasibility and impact report, highlighting the experiences gained in implementing VIC in different integration measures - Audiovisual success stories demonstrating how integration competence can be enhanced and validated VIC will be implemented by a consortium of six partners from Europe’s two main refugee entry countries (Italy (Sicily), Greece), from two main refugees host countries (Germany, Austria) and from a country with huge, decade-long experience in integrating non-European immigrants (France). They have all sold experience in refugee integration, adult education and transnational project work.
After the arrival of hundreds of thousands refugees since 2015, Europe has been faced with the task to integrate those refugees with a legal title to stay. In main entry countries (Greece, Italy) and major host countries (Germany, Austria, France) there are a number of different educational offers in place which aim at easing refugees and immigrants’ pathways to integration into the labour market and society in large. They aim at increasing the competence of refugees and immigrants to integrate into the European host societies. However, there is no common, precise and operational definition of this "integration competence". Neither is the effectiveness of integration programmes measured or their impact on individual integration competence assessed. This was the starting point of VIC: The VIC consortium analysed the varying objectives of integration programmes across Europe in order to distil from them an operational working definition of “integration competence”. Due to the heterogeneity of educational offers and a lack of a description of their learning outcomes and aspired competences, it was difficult to derive a common definition, though. Thus, the consortium began its development programme with an explanatory approach to what integration means: integration is understood as a two-way process and can best be summarised as "learning to live together in a diverse society". This guided the further development and defined the "integration competence". The VIC partners identified a set of 14 competences needed to live together peacefully in diverse societies. These are among others: networking, communication, intercultural competences, flexibility, social engagement, critical thinking, reliability, etc. Building on solid and valuable experience gained with a scientifically developed competence validation methodology called LEVEL5 the VIC partners developed a competence framework consisting of reference systems for each of the sub-competences. The reference systems are based on a three-dimensional model which maps the development of: • Knowledge (-> cognitions) • Skills (-> actions) and • Attitudes (-> emotions and values) along five quality levels – from beginner to competent expert. Based on the competence framework the consortium established a competence oriented learning and validation approach for integration competences. This comprises an approach which does not only convey knowledge but also considers capabilities and attitudes as other competence dimensions in the learning offers and takes on board the principles of constructive, activity related and practical learning. Partners developed a training course aimed to support educators to plan, deliver and evaluate innovative integration learning activities and eventually to validate the integration competences developed in these learning offers. The course consists of four modules: M1 – Introduction to the VIC approach: context, challenges, current policy and approaches M2 – Competence oriented learning and validation, competence framework, introduction to LEVEL5 M3 – Planning and delivering integration learning activities based on the VIC approach M4 – Competence validation The modules are accessible via the VIC Moodle platform and are available in all partner languages + English. During the piloting phase (12/18-06/19), the course was tested by all partners involving 90 adult educators and 200 refugees. The adult educators implemented concrete learning projects in their training programmes to apply their newly acquired knowledge into practice. Competences of both trainers and learners were validated by means of LEVEL5. Feedback showed that a majority of educators had never before validated integration competences. They reported that it made a valuable contribution to the self-assessment and further individual competence development of their learners and helped them to reflect on their competences in terms of integrating into the society and being an active citizen. In a nutshell, the main outputs are: - A competence framework, defining “integration competence” and tailoring the LEVEL5 system to the promotion and validation of that competence - A blended learning course for adult educators - A feasibility and impact report highlighting the experiences gained in implementing VIC - Case studies demonstrating how integration competence can concretely be enhanced and validated with the VIC approach - An assessment methodology which makes the impact of educational programmes visible In general, through VIC refugees receive more systematic and more targeted support of their integration competence development, and a certification which may help in the labour market on the one hand, and boost their confidence and motivation for integration, on the other hand. The partners have implemented the VIC outputs in their work and have a vivid interest in continuing the European collaboration in future project and common activities.