Last week (3-9 November) was a week packed with professional events and activities. One of these events was the Working Conference held on the 4th, 5th and 6th at the University of Deusto as part of the UNIC alliance, in which I was able to actively participate.
For those of you who are not familiar with it, UNIC (European University of Cities in Post-Industrial Transition) is a European alliance that was created in 2020 and is part of the European Commission’s European Universities Initiative. It is made up of 10 universities whose main objective is to develop innovation for inclusive and super-diverse higher education, and city-university cooperation for greater social and community impact.
UNIC has 7 thematic lines (TL) and 6 work packages (WP), which are led by one or more universities in the alliance and include representatives from all the universities in the alliance.
In my case, I am working with an interdisciplinary and inter-university team of creative and innovative individuals to promote equally innovative approaches to teaching, learning and mobility, especially virtual mobility, among teachers and students. For me, this is an eminently entrepreneurial endeavour in which, every time we meet (at least once a month), we try to work towards innovative education by generating ideas that help us move forward in an increasingly complex society.
Through the WP I collaborate with, we have created the UNIC CTL Teaching and Learning Centre, which encompasses key units for teaching, learning and mobility. Our goal is to consolidate the work done in previous years and deepen institutional collaboration for greater sustainability, innovation and shared resources. At the CTL, we design training courses and educational materials, and propose spaces for the promotion of educational innovation.
During the Working Conference, we had the opportunity to explore how colleagues from the other nine universities perceive educational innovation within the alliance. To do this, our WP prepared a world café to stimulate an activity that gave us some clues to continue our work.
Today, I would also like to highlight the opportunity I had to exchange opinions, points of view and, of course, business cards (yes, the traditional kind) with colleagues from the Universities of Koc (Turkey), Cork (Ireland), Erasmus (Netherlands), Ruhr University Bochum (Germany), Malmö (Sweden) and Zagreb (Croatia). All of them make proposals on entrepreneurial education, each from their own post-industrial and diverse contexts and possibilities. For me, it was a unique opportunity to be able to share with people from so many different universities who have something in common, which is a commitment to entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial people. So today, without a doubt, the UNIC alliance deserves a space in this blog!
Let’s see how I start this post and how I continue it. I could tell so many things about our entrepreneur woman that, I admit that it is difficult for me to start the post. Today our protagonist is Cristina, whom I have met thanks to another great entrepreneur that I have already told you about on more than one occasion,