Within the framework of the European INOS project (Integrating open and citizen science into active learning approaches in higher education), a "recommendations guidelines" for universities has just been published, referring in particular to the Ocean i3 Project, in the framework of the implementation and evaluation of open innovation activities in higher education.
The INOS project, which associates 6 European partners including 4 universities, focuses on integrating open and citizen science in higher education institutions (HEI) curricula with the main objective of making HEIs key open knowledge and open innovation agents in a changing world.
In order to strengthen existing open innovation methodologies, the project is supporting several Open Innovation Activities (OIAs), ideally bringing together academic staff and students from different disciplines to involve them in the transformation of knowledge into innovative solutions.
The purpose of this guidelines (Guidelines on designing, implementing and evaluating open innovation activities) is to help organizers of OIAs with designing and evaluating their activities and ultimately optimize their impact. The document oscillates between state of the art on the subject and practical cases, borrowing in particular specific examples from the University of Bordeaux.
Among these examples we find in section 5 the Ocean i3 pedagogical innovation project for its innovative approach and the involvement of specific participants (external stakeholders, mentors...) who propose challenges, and for its multilingual and multicultural diversity.
Here below is an extract of the guidelines where the Oceani3 project is mentioned
(Blanchard A. and Schwalm H. (2020). Guidelines on designing, implementing and evaluating openinnovation activities in higher education. A. Blanchard (Ed.). INOS Consortium.)
In addition to interdisciplinarity, Ocean i3 mixes participants from the intercultural and multilingual Euroregion (French Aquitaine and Spanish Basque Country), using three national and regional languages: Spanish, Euskara (Basque), and French. Since this is an international project, a logical and “efficient” decision would have been to work in English as the lingua franca. However, the organizers chose to promote multilingualism with a focus on social cohesion and intercultural dialogue, seen as an opportunity to develop transversal skills not only linked to the knowledge of languages and communication resources, but also to empathy and the awareness of diverse cultural realities, assuming that languages are key vehicles for cultures. In order to achieve this, the organizers where supported by researchers from the DREAM - Donostia Research in Education and Multilingualism group from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), using a participatory research approach to learn, accompany, and guide intercultural and multilingual practices within the Ocean i3 community. Their key messages, which can be applied to other dimensions of intercultural dialogue, were:
1. to deal with and take advantage of the multilingual environment,
2. to protect the rich language diversity of the participants. Consequently, specific rules have been established to improve operativeness, while protecting linguistic and cultural diversity:
● all local languages are welcome, in addition to English, which is used as the lingua franca,
● the use of minority languages is especially encouraged,
● each person may use the language they are most comfortable with and may alternate between languages if they wish,
● the challenge is to co-construct meaning together using all the linguistic resources of the participants:
- speak at an adequate pace in order to make it easier for the others to understand,
- when possible, include multiple languages in the supporting material for contributions,
- indicate if someone doesn’t understand the speaker so he or she can repeat, paraphrase, translate, slow down, etc.,
- sit next to someone who speaks other languages than you do, in order to best combine linguistic resources,
- use simultaneous-spontaneous translation in order to help each other out,
switch languages any time you feel the need to do so.
Support material had been prepared, such as help cards that participants may use to ask someone to repeat an idea, speak slower, request translation, or report that a concept has not been understood.
The Ocean i3 experience shows that intercultural dialogue (and more specifically multilingualism) can be dealt with as an enabler instead of a barrier between participants, all the more so as it is assumed rather than just accommodated.
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