Building intercultural competence : a handbook for professionals in education, social work and healt care

This book provides an interdisciplinary, international and inter-professional perspective on building intercultural competences within three professional ambits: education, social work and health care. Starting from the experience gained during an Intensive Programme, the International Course of Intercultural Competences (ICIC) developed within the EU Lifelong Learning Programmes (LLP) for Education and Training, this book offers a relevant example of action-research in lifelong intercultural learning.

It joins two fundamental moments in all research. On the one hand, the book represents the theoretical framework, implying analysis, framing, conceptualization and inference of new knowledge. On the other hand, the book focuses on the practice, implying observation, active intervention in real life situations and evidence of changes according to an integrated and dynamic process.

The solid theoretical background of the described actionresearch and the close anchorage between theory and practice, conceived in full harmony with the EU priorities and UNESCO’s pillars in education, gave life to an enhanced concept of lifelong learning in the field of intercultural education. As a consequence, the initial idea of a field-book about a learning experience developed into a real hand-book on building intercultural competences in these professions.

Over de auteurs:

MARIA GIOVANNA ONORATI is a PhD researcher and lecturer in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the Faculty of Education of the University of Valle d’Aosta. Her main research interests are cultural variability in an intercultural perspective, intercultural communication and media education.

FURIO BEDNARZ is president of ECAP Foundation (Switzerland) and senior researcher at the same institution. He leads research and pilot projects at transnational level in the fields of migration and the labour market, intercultural dynamics and innovation of learning pathways.