Merging Refugee Educators Competences and Skills

Merging Refugee-Educators Competences and Skills (EMERGEnCeS) collects Good Practices of integrating refugee- educators, refugees with a teacher’s background in their country of origin, in the destination countries through educational entrepreneurship. Together with host-country teachers (European teachers) they set up communities of practice (CoPs) to develop cross-cultural content, pedagogical approaches and socio-emotional responses. These CoPs work in a mixed method combining co-creation, decolonisation, action-learning, and a whole learner approach.On a second level, they co-create a digital assessment rubric reflecting on the cultural integrity and cultural competences on an organisational, individual and interactional level, a policy text outlining the added value of refugee-teachers and in-service teacher-training programme for teaching refugees. Thus, EMERGEnCeS harnesses the skills and competences of refugees with a teacher’s background into new job opportunities mediating between the country of origin’s educational culture and the pedagogical approaches of the destination country either as volunteer, co-teacher, teacher, content developer or counsellor. These possibilities are formatted as social entrepreneurship. The project also offers an in-service training for teachers teaching refugees.EMERGEnCeS links social entrepreneurs with NGOs and educational institutes who all share an extensive network of refugees: Kilowatt soc coop(Italy, social entrepreneur), ZSOCIALNO PODJETJEDRUZENJE SOCIALNA EKONOMIJA SLOVENIJE (Slovenia, social entrepreneur), EUROPEAN PROFESSIONALS NETWORK (NGO, Belgium);RESEAU PROACTIF (NGO, France)ICHB Gimnaziu (secondary school, Romania), UCLL (Belgium, HEI), andTampere University (Finland, HEI). Thus, EMERGEnCes create a sense of belonging in a multicultural society.