Since 2014, stimulated by the support of the European Youth Foundation of the Council of Europe, EFIL has introduced leading annual themes, giving a common direction to the activities in each year. After previous years’ themes linked to Citizenship Education, Peace Education, Diversity and Inclusion, the 2018 topic is “Intercultural Learning in the 21stcentury: impact and approaches to unite polarised societies”.
The choice of this topic is a consequence of the growing concern in AFS about the applicability of our ICL know-how to the everyday diversity issues. We would like to increase society impact, respond to changes and challenges around us, engage volunteers into educational initiatives beyond mobility, be more innovative, offer high-quality ICL tools, and therefore reach new audiences who would benefit from our Mission. This direction is a natural consequence of noticing the troubling world events (right wing populism, polarisation, othering…) and partly a result of EFIL’s past annual themes, taken on board by many national and local volunteers.
In this context, AFS Partners ask EFIL for more concrete tools, which can be easily multiplied and applied in their daily organisational realities. They also ask for maximum synergies between the different processes in the organisation: continuation of issues addressed in previous years, contribution to the global Network Strategy, inter-links between new and older types of AFS initiatives.
The 2018 EFIL Work Plan will aim at responding to these needs through four activities:
- the Expert Meeting “New angles in intercultural education”, involving key AFS educators and laying the content foundation for the year,
- the development of “Online Course on Intercultural Issues in Today’s Realities” whose content will be largely based on the recommendations from the Expert Meeting,
- the EFIL Volunteer Summer Summit “Civic Education against extremism” where the outcomes of the first two activities and additional theme contents will be explored in different thematic tracks,
- the Training for Trainers “Blended Learning for Intercultural Competence”, where the newly developed e-learning course will be put into practice.
These ambitious plans are kicking off in high speed as of January 2018. Please stay tuned for further updates as EFIL moves on with the next steps of the annual plan!
For more information: izabela.jurczik-arnold@afs.org
Read about last years’ theme here: http://efil.afs.org/2017/03/16/2017-is-efils-year-of-inclusion/