Within the Transform4Europe Alliance, the kick-off meeting for a research cooperation between Saarland University (Sport Science Institute) and Trieste University (Department of Life Sciences – Psychology Unit) took place this week. A delegation from the University of Trieste – Prof. Tiziano Agostini, Prof. Mauro Murgia and Prof. Fabrizio Sors – visited the campus of Saarbrücken and the laboratories of Prof. Sabine Schaefer, Dr. Christian Kaczmarek, and MA Kai Leisge. The cooperation aims to investigate the effects of spectators on untrained fine-motor skills, and sport-specific effects of spectators (e.g., in soccer).
The meeting represented a fruitful opportunity to exchange ideas and plan a set of research activities that will be conducted jointly by the research groups of both universities in the next months.
CALL FOR APPLICATIONS BY STUDENTS AT THE TRANSFORM4EUROPE ALLIANCE UNIVERSITIES
Call for applications by students at the Transform4Europe alliance universities
The European Universities Community is launching the second edition of the European Student Assembly [#ESA23].
The European Student Assembly is a grassroots project that gathers each year more than 200 students from different European University Alliances (EUA) to debate current issues, draft political recommendations for the future of Europe and advocate them among stakeholders and decision makers. It is monitored by an international team of students and staff from higher education institutions involved in the European Universities Initiative.
From March to May 2023, the selected students will work remotely to deepen their understanding of a chosen topic and prepare recommendations before meeting with their peers for a 3 days intercultural event in Strasbourg from 31 May to 2 June to discuss and finalise their recommendations.
As students and part of Transform4Europe, you are eligible to apply!
Please note that accommodation costs will be taken care of by ESA, and that selected students will have their travel costs from European countries covered by Transform4Europe.
Applications are open and the deadline to submit your application is 4th December (before 23:59 CET).
The Transform4Europe Alliance is proud to announce that the Consortium, now consisting of 7 partner Universities, will grow even bigger in the future: On 9 November, the rectors of our consortium as well as the rectors of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (Lisbon, Portugal), the University of Primorska (Koper, Slovenia), the Jean Monnet University (Saint Etienne, France) met to discuss the collaboration within our European University Alliance.
This enlargement represents a further development to our common goal: Transforming Europe by educating and training knowledge entrepreneurs and overcoming modern challenges together.
Our new partners do not only share our great European values and ambitions, but they also geographically and linguistically diversify our Alliance even further and will contribute with their experience and ideas in knowledge entrepreneurlism for the digital, environmental and societal transformation.
In addition, the Transform4Europe Alliance shows their strong support with Ukraine by welcoming Mariupol State University as an associated partner to the Consortium. The Alliance will do everything at their hands to support the Ukrainian University that has undergone severe shelling by Russia and is now operating in the Exile from Kyiv, thus defending European values and scientific freedom.
To our new partners:
Bem-vindo, Dobrodošli, Bienvenue and Ласкаво просимо!
WIthin the initiatives connected to the T4EU Project, Saturday, October the 22nd, the students of two partner Universities held an initiative for which they had started working a few months ago.
The international conference, entitled “Life in Original Language”, aimed at highlighting the incredible life experiences that language knowledge can bring you.
Three speakers from USaar (Lukas Redemann), SISSA (Nadia Bersier) and Units (Francesca Di Rosso) spoke about how they lived abroad, learned each time the local language, and how enriching it was to seek understanding between cultures.
But their message about multilingualism would have been less strong, if they hadn’t spoken each in their language (German, French and Italian), simultaneously interpreted by the students of the Studies Section in Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste.
A special award goes to the Student Group “Trieste Interpreting Practice”, which launched the project and organized the whole event, granted by the University of Trieste and University of Saarland under the flag of the T4EU Alliance.
Margherita Giordano, T4EU Student Ambassador from Trieste comments:
“As a language student, it was really interesting to hear how foreign languages can play an important role in the lives of people who use them on a daily basis as a way to communicate, rather than as the main element of their jobs or studies.
It was also very useful to learn more about the job of interpreters, and I found it fascinating to listen to them as they interpreted simultaneously.”
Multilingualism and Multiculturalism are indeed a corner stone in the Transform4Europe European University Project and are also part of one of the 3 key actions of the European Students Assembly.
In taking the initiative, the students of the partner Universities showed that these are not empty words and that they are ready to live up to it.
This year, Transform4Europe Alliance hosted
its first Innovative Teaching Award for all Alliance members. The
purpose of this award was to identify, acknowledge and recognize
innovative teaching practices and to provide opportunities not only for sharing
and exchanging best examples but also to encourage cooperation between the
Higher Education Institutions of the Transform4Europe alliance.
The applications were evaluated, and a
mixed committee selected the winners. The Selection Committee was composed of 7
representatives (one member per institution) and included teaching staff
members, students or independent experts (stakeholders, etc.).
The awards consist of 2500 € each for the
realization of innovative or creative teaching projects (4 awards). The next
round of applications will be announced in 2023.
The four winners will be presented their awards during the first annual
Transform4Europe international Conference-hackathon for Innovative Teaching and
Learning Methods in Higher Education on 24 October 2022. You can check the full
conference programme here.
Best-rated
Innovative Teaching ideas:
1) Educational Escape Room
Monika Frania from the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland
The optional Educational Escape Room course
is an example of good didactic practice for teaching adults, where education
meets fun. Participants, divided into project teams, deepen their digital
skills and social competencies, taking part in an adventure during which they
not only solve puzzles but have to create their escape room. For this, one needs
knowledge, creativity, and determination. In education, overcoming difficulties
is essential, and the escape room is an example of a challenge.
2) Critical Thinking and the Digital
Gender Divide: Transforming Students’ Mindset for a Better Future
María D. De-Juan-Vigaray and María Elena González Gascón from the University of
Alicante, Spain
The purpose of this good practice is to discover whether
Active Learning methodology, using different technologies, contributes to
improving the Critical Thinking of the student body, applying it to the Digital
Gender Divide. The importance of the practice becomes relevant in the context
of European higher transformation to students of the Business Administration
programme in their final semester of studies, who are about to become
professionals entering the labour market.
3) Intensive Care Medicine and Pain
Therapy
Tobias Hüppe and Department of Anaesthesiology, Intensive Care Medicine and
Pain Therapy from Saarland University, Germany
“Masterclass: Intensive Care
Medicine” is offered synchronously as an interactive live event. The 15
seminars (120 min each) are given by fifteen internationally experienced
intensivists and include the topics of Shock and Resuscitation – Cardiac
Disease – Respiratory Disease – Renal Disease – Infectious Disease – Surgical –
Medical Ethics in ICU. The course includes clinical case scenarios,
ventilator curves and biochemistry, blended learning with a video-based visit
to the intensive care unit, principles and content of evidence-based critical
care medicine and an online final exam. Live demonstrations of intensive care
interventions (intubation, bronchoscopy, thoracic drainage installation,
cannulation of an ECMO, etc. on cadaver preparations) are intended to convey
the practical elements of intensive care medicine.
4) Visible Interactive Speaker for
International Best Learning Experience Marcel Lauterbach from Saarland University, Germany
Programming skills for data analysis are
taught in an international online class to interdisciplinary students from six
universities. The class uses a virtual webcam to make the lecturer visible in
the PowerPoint slides, which creates a personal link with the students. Using a
“virtual webcam” that overlays PowerPoint and the webcam, the
presenter becomes visible IN the slides, not in a separate small window. Exercises
with personal tutoring in breakout sessions give immediate feedback to the
students, and in-class discussions with them contribute to community building
and inclusion.
A delegation of our University is in Kaunas to attend the conference and taking
part to the workshops:
Prof. Giovanni Bacaro gives the lecture: “How
to “game” the system through the promotion of inclusive student-built
game-based frameworks in STEM subjects.”
Professors Valentina Bologna, Elena
Bortolotti, Francesco Longo, Renata Longo, Maria Peressi, Paolo Sorzio are
giving the lecture: “Including students with learning disorders in Physics
Higher Education.”
And Professors Alessandro Carrieri, Tullia
Catalan, Roberta Altin will take part at the Transform4europe International
Conference-Hackathon for INNO-METHODS Workshop
We will hold the Trieste Regional Policy Roundtable on 3rd October 2022 from 5pm to 7pm.The title of this event will be: T4ERI and social inclusion through museums in border areas: the new ICOM 2022 definition.
This roundtable reflects the will to discuss how, and to what extent, our region can implement the new definition of ‘inclusive’, as recently established by ICOM, the International Council of Museums, in Prague.
The content of the roundtable is well illustrated by the following sentence: “A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.”
The event, moderated by Prof. Roberta Altin and Prof.
Tullia Catalan from the University of Trieste, will be divided into two parts:
1st part: prof. Catherine Brice of the Paris-Est Créteil University and Dr. Mario Buletic, Curator of the Ethnographic Museum of Istria, in Pazin (Croatia) will introduce the topic of the roundtable;
2nd part: stakeholders will engage in a debate around the new definition of ‘participative museum’, as defined by ICOM, starting from questions by the moderators.
The following Stakeholders have been invited:
ERPAC (Regional Body for Cultural and Artistic Heritage)
The Transform4Europe
Alliance aims to ease the experience of visiting students by establishing the
Student Ambassador Programme, which provides them with “buddies” to welcome,
foster, and support them during their mobility.
The Ambassadors are outstanding
students from the home university, with a good knowledge of the city, the
university, the Transform4Europe Alliance, and of more than one language.
Let’s get to know the
University of Trieste’s new Student Ambassadors:
Margherita Giordano is a bachelor degree student in modern
language translation and the current president of ESN Trieste. She is also
involved in ESN Italy and she has had several other international and
volunteering experiences. As a language student, she is very keen on
getting in touch with different cultures and practicing foreign languages, and
she hopes that the Student Ambassador Programme will allow her to do just that.
Solange Lazzaro is also
a language student, specializing in Spanish and German. As for her
international experiences, she spent some time in England and Spain when she
was in high school, while during her university studies she became a member of
ESN Trieste. She hopes that the Student Ambassador Programme will help her meet
new people and get to know their languages and cultures.
Nurah Omar studies
Translation and Law and has two great passions: languages and volunteering. She
already speaks six languages, but she is always looking for new ones to learn.
She has a rich baggage of volunteering experiences, that range from helping
refugee children to assisting victims of domestic violence. At the moment, she
also organizes events for the Islamic Cultural Centre of Trieste as well as for
ESN Trieste, and she is very excited about her new role as a Student
Ambassador!
The Transform4Europe Alliance has developed various innovative training materials as short online training units (webinars).
The training sessions will be launched in May-June 2022.
The webinars will cater to and foster various skills of every academic and non-academic staff member from across the Alliance. The list of available webinars, including the registration form, is below:
The University of Trieste will be attending the Transform4Europe weeek held in Katowice, Poland.
A delegation of 34 people, made up of students, professors and technical-administrative staff, will be present in Katowice, city of the Silesian University hosting the event, from 9th to 13th May. All 7 universities of the Alliance will take part in a rich programme of debates, workshops and joint research projects.
Professor Pallavicini, the Rector’s delegate for internationalisation and contact person for the Transform4 Europe project, comments: “This event is a unique opportunity, not olny for educational purposes, but also for networking, as all the people who remotely worked together for over a year, will finally have the chance to meet in person. Next year, the University of Trieste is going to host the second edition of the Transform4Europe week.”
