The project aim is to design and implement effective training tools for enhancing key skills and competences of two groups, highly-skilled refugee professionals and the language teachers who work with them. These will enhance the employability and societal integration of refugee professionals, and so will help to grow the pool of available professional talent in the countries receiving refugees. Among the over a million refugees currently in Europe, it is estimated that there are around 15,000 people of this type. They are presently not well served by education for employment commensurate with their prior professional skills and knowledge. The project focus is on improving the achievement of this target group in the key competency of professional intercultural communicative competence (PICC). For the language teachers who work with them, the focus is on extending and developing their competences as educators by developing their abilities to develop materials and to teach PICC. This project aims to extend the reach and scope of other EU-funded projects related to the lingua-cultural needs of refugees already being led by Newcastle University. The project partners all have relevant language and intercultural communication expertise, good contacts with targets groups, and a strong track record of delivering on objectives. They are The University of Graz, Austria, The Mercator Research Centre, the Netherlands and Action Foundation, a charity working with refugees in the UK. Project activities are to: (a) identify and articulate the profession-relevant communicative, interactional and intercultural needs of highly-skilled refugees which would enable them to find employment in the professional domain for which they are best qualified (b) identify and articulate the training and skill-development needs of educators, agency professionals, and employment consultants, working with highly-skilled refugees (c) produce communication, interactional and professional-oriented intercultural competence-focused teaching and learning materials informed by robust and evidence-based conceptualisations of PICC for refugee professionals, educators, and employment agency staff. The project will employ a multi-methodological approach. This will ensure that the materials designed are informed by detailed evidence of the needs and experiences of refugees and educators, and that its findings and outputs are clearly tested and generalisable to other contexts in Europe. Phase 1 will involve a needs analysis derived from detailed ethnographic research. Phase 2 will involve the co-production of toolkits of teaching and learning materials based on this needs analysis. Phase 3 will involve piloting, testing, and evaluating these toolkits with networks of agencies working with refugee professionals across national contexts. The project outcome will be a toolkit comprised of two training modules: - 'Professional intercultural communicative competence for work and life’ (aimed at refugee professionals) - 'Teaching professional intercultural communicative competence’ (aimed at educators) These will be designed so they can be adapted for use by target groups in any EU country. The project will impact very positively in a number of ways across a range of stakeholders. The modules developed will facilitate refugee professionals in gaining the profession-relevant intercultural communication skills to enable them to find socially-useful employment commensurate with their levels of professional attainment. Among lingua-cultural educators and agency professionals, the project will provide materials to address the needs of these people and the organisations they work for. The co-production methodology will help to build capacity in agencies working with refugees, and so help them to take on a leadership role in the skills development of this group among other agencies. For the teachers and refugees involved in the co-production of the modules, participants will acquire new skills to equip them to support their peers. Findings from this project will also inform theory, research and practice in the burgeoning field of intercultural communication. More broadly, and in the longer term, the toolkit developed by this multidisciplinary, multi-agency and international partnership will set a new vision for training and skills development at the supranational level for organisations working with refugees who were formerly professionals in their home countries. The co-production model employed in this project has applicability to other contexts EU-wide, and could be extended to include other groups such as professionals with disabilities. The research publications and other dissemination outputs will contribute to knowledge of the academic and language-educational communities, and inform policy-making at European and international levels.
Europe recently experienced a dramatic influx of refugees. By the end of 2015, the European Union as a whole had received over 1.2 million first-time asylum claims (IOM, 2015). A small but significant sub-group of these people on the move are highly qualified professionals – doctors, architects, lawyers, teachers, engineers – who often find themselves in low-skilled, minimum-wage jobs for which they are over-qualified. Their skill sets and professional experience often count for little, as host countries in an alarming number of cases fail to utilise the potential of much sought-after qualified personnel. The integration of these highly skilled individuals into the labour market is crucial in order to avoid their long-term dependency and marginalization, and to create a positive image in the eyes of the public. Against this backdrop the ‘Critical Skills for Life and Work’ project (2017-2019), led by Newcastle University in the UK in partnership with the University of Graz in Austria, Fryske Academy in the Netherlands, and Action Foundation, a Newcastle-based refugee charity, sought to identify and articulate the profession-relevant communicative, interactional and intercultural needs of highly-skilled refugees, which would enable them to find employment in a professional domain for which they are qualified. The team’s ultimate aim was to design and implement effective training tools for enhancing the professional intercultural communicative competence (PICC) of highly skilled refugees and the language teachers who work with them. The four project partners worked with a group of 26 of highly skilled refugees and migrants, and with 15 teachers across the UK, Austria and the Netherlands to co-create a set of resources that can be useful in a diversity of European contexts. The result was an online toolkit for teachers and learners. The toolkit was developed as part of a two-stage collaborative process: In stage one (research stage) the team investigated in detail the lives and experiences of people who had successfully made the transition from refugee status back into the professional sphere. This was done through 15 ethnographic interviews (‘success stories’) which sought to discover exactly how these people had made the transition, what had helped them, what had hindered them, and what they could pass on to others like them by way of advice. Additionally, 21 focus groups were held with learners and teachers in the different locations, to gauge current provision and their needs in relation to developing PICC. Findings from this stage pointed to the importance of agency, resilience, self-motivation, as well as language and intercultural communication skills. In stage two (co-production), the team worked closely with local refugees and volunteer language teachers to develop learning and teaching materials. These were then piloted and trialled through a series of workshops and multiplier events with different target groups, including agencies working with skilled refugees, teaching organisations such as colleges of further and higher education, and relevant employers and employment agencies. The aim was to create a model which can be extended to other contexts. The main dissemination event was the project conference on 21st June 2019, which was attended by 100 people. The conference was also the official launch of the toolkit. The toolkit offers two modules: Module A: Teaching professional intercultural communicative competence (IO2: for teachers) Module B: Professional intercultural communicative competence for work and life (IO3: for learners) Both modules are available to download for free on the project website (http://cslw.eu/). Relevant sections of the toolkit have been translated and localised into German and Dutch. Each module consists of five parallel units: (1) context & background, (2) finding a job, (3) applying for a job, (4) being interviewed and, (5) starting a job. Each unit includes a set of activities designed for classroom use (for teachers) or for self-study (learners). All activities relate to the development of PICC. Supplementary materials and extension tasks are included at the end of each unit. The units are self-standing to allow teachers and learners to choose units and activities depending on their own specific needs and circumstances. From a linguistic perspective, the toolkit is built around the assumption that refugee and migrant professionals will have some linguistic capital. The primary aim of the toolkit is to develop PICC, as opposed to linguistic proficiency in any specific ‘target language’. Using all their plurilingual resources, learners might engage with input in one language and generate meaning in contextually appropriate ways. The toolkit has been and continues to be promoted through several activities: Conference presentations, the project website and social media activities, online posts and newsletters (for details see sections 6.3 and 6.2 below).