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!
Shrabani Aranzabe-Pita
In 2017, Shrabani created the youth singing school with a clear goal: ‘to learn to sing’. Then came the Tolosa Youth Choir (TAG), with a goal that went a little further: ‘to create community’. And so we come to 2021, when she created ‘Naturaren Doinuak’ (Sounds of Nature), with the aim of achieving personal development and helping people to transform themselves. In fact, ‘it currently aims to promote comprehensive development and participation in the field of education, using artistic experiences as a tool, especially with vulnerable groups.’
We know that there are things to improve, because nobody is perfect, but today I want to focus on the positive aspects of the June 12 session (we will leave the improvements to work on them). This time, this post is for the gifted students. Their presentations have been very diverse, from projects based on cows that can fly or cows that listen to music to produce better quality milk, to entrepreneurial projects based on the interests of young people or companies that bet on social economy and integrated social value.
