Our major consortial partner in the present application was the Mitteldeutsches Bildungsinstitut (Johanniter Akademie), which had included the stays abroad as an elective subject in the curriculum for the training courses for educators and curative education nurses in the 2nd year of training. The aim was to enable the trainees to do a 2-week internship in another country in a crèche, kindergarten, school or youth club or care facility (curative education nurse) and to get to know the other educational systems in a "contrastive comparison". The trainees were intensively prepared for the stays, were given tasks and assignments to complete abroad, and the stay was graded, evaluated and assessed. In addition to the professional competencies, the linguistic, personal and social competencies of the participants were expanded and the general orientation of the Mitteldeutsches Bildungsinstitut was further advanced by this project. FAIRbund e.V. itself is responsible for 6 kindergartens and trains up to 10 kindergarten teachers per year in in-service training. As an association, we wanted to follow the European developments in pedagogy and offer our employees and trainees the opportunity to further their education and broaden their horizons. Our consortium partner Humanitas gGmbH is itself a provider of day care centers for children. In the past, we have already been able to carry out successful educational projects in Europe with Humanitas gGmbH. For the present application, the practical teamleaders and managers of Humanitas gGmbH wanted to travel to Spain on the topic of inclusion and working with people with special needs. The goal of Humanitas gGmbH was to collect ideas and enter into an exchange with organizations in Spain which have a similar target group. All three partners had the idea to further internationalize their companies/organizations and to promote intercultural competences of employees and managers, trainees and vocational trainers and thus be viable for the future. In times of increasing migration, the organizations working together here would like to make a contribution to promoting diversity and interculturality and counteracting xenophobia and fear of foreigners.
The application was submitted as a consortium of 3 institutions to enable the trainees of the Johanniter Academy to develop their own intercultural skills and competences with the help of an internship abroad. The vocational school has included the elective subject "Intercultural Education - European Pedagogy in Comparison" in the curriculum and thus enabled the trainees to develop these skills. Abroad, the participants had to use English as the altenative language, and relied on their body language and their own ability to adapt. The self-reflection helped the trainees to understand the situation of migrants in Germany and to gain knowledge about different educational systems, other methods and practical ideas for their own work in Germany. The participants are all in a school education and they need to do internships to get practical background. Through the visits of the teachers during the 2nd week of the practical stay, the participants also had the opportunity to reflect and classify the experience with an experienced teacher already on site. The vocational school teachers themselves were able to better understand and evaluate what the trainees had learned and experienced and were also able to learn a lot about other countries and educational systems for themselves. The trainees were also supported by the mentors at work and the mentors of the intermediary organizations to understand cultural misunderstandings and to get questions answered. The practice supervisors of Humanitas gGmbH had long had the idea to travel to Spain on the topic of inclusion and working with people with special needs. The training trip was organized by our long-term partner Trainee Up+ and the topics of the educators were taken up.