The desire to open up to international opportunities has been under consideration and discussion at EAFC since the 2015-2016 academic year, at the instigation of the Management and the Quality Coordinator.
Some of our students have already had the opportunity to observe practices abroad. The audits carried out in February 2016 and November 2021 on the 'Bachelier en éducation spécialisée en accompagnement psycho-éducatif’, now known as the ‘Bachelier éducateur spécialisé en accompagnement psycho-éducatif’ (BacEduc), were conducted by European experts and highlighted many qualities and good practices in our operations, while encouraging our staff and students to engage in European and international mobility.
Our objective is therefore to put these ideas into practice.
On one hand, our students have often already had a foot in the professional milieu and for some, contacts with colleagues abroad (mainly in the EU) during meetings, formations or colloquiums, …. So they will be able to facilitate the contacts between our Institute and new partner internship places, especially because the Council of BacEduc students has open and constructive links with our pedagogic team and staff. This front door, a partnership suggested to our team by the students themselves, seems more motivating.
On the other hand, we register in our BacEduc course a quite important number of French students. Our school rules allow them to do their internship of specialized educators in their origin country. The professors who supervise the internships are then in regular contact with them : the idea of a more formalized partnership is then a “natural” step.
The choice criteria of our partners depend on various factors :
- the language regularly used in the welcoming country in accordance with the one(s) regularly known by the welcomed students / staff.
- the welcome quality
- the shared desire of expanding and making more dynamic a team
- the prospect of collaboration, cooperation and lasting contacts on our respective practices (not only during the physical presence”).
In accordance with the language criterium, France is of course our preference in a first time, for most of our students at least. This criterium seems all the more important as we target essentially institutions – internship places where our students have to interact with people who benefit by educational support. French seems therefore an important facilitating element.
However, for the educative staff and the students, partnerships with English-speaking, Spanish-speaking and Dutch-speaking countries are not excluded at all : we can integrate into our team at least one person who speaks the welcoming country's language.
In a first time, we target countries which are members of the EU, but we are open to any partnership out of Europe too.
The proposals of partnerships, based on the professional practice, supervised by the Direction and registered in the Quality Route of our school are then our first essential approach :
. our BacEduc students' mobility (mainly at the 3rd level) in order to discover and share : different educative methods or same methods but applied in another context, taking into account of the cultural dimension, adaptable to unknown or badly known relational practices, exchange of tips of work, …
. our BacEduc pedagogic team and our staff's mobility in general with the same goals of discovering and sharing, but also in order to optimize the transmission of knowledge in formation
It seems to us essential to be part of a European view of sharing experiences because the joined expertise of ones and others is a major asset in a world where urgency and profitability are prior and where the social workers are not spared.
Open and dynamic exchanging practices will allow everybody to be reassured, to develop a critical mind, to innovate, to strengthen but essentially to realize that cultural backgrounds different from ours cause inevitably different approaches and that where we can fail because of isolated work, a different point of view can show us a parallel way.
Finally, because teachers have the mission to facilitate the autonomy of their students and to make them world citizens, needless to say the necessity of a European inscription.
We are therefore looking for efficient and constructive exchanges with institutions and organizations focused on the professional practice in a social-educative milieu and we commit ourselves to welcome “incoming people” according to these principles.
The “incoming students” could moreover benefit from the same services as those given to our students : structure of help to success and remediation, “French as a foreign language” courses or Advanced French courses, help for the administrative papers, welcoming and information in various languages (French, Dutch, English, Italian, Spanish), ...