We need mental and physical reference points. We need physical reference points such as signposts to show us which way to go, for example to the airport or the hospital, and we need reference points to show us where we are. Why? If you don’t know where you are, it’s quite a difficult job to find your way, thus landmarks and “lieux de memoire” play an important role in our lives.
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We need mental and physical reference points. We need physical reference points such as signposts to show us which way to go, for example to the airport or the hospital, and we need reference points to show us where we are. Why? If you don’t know where you are, it’s quite a difficult job to find your way, thus landmarks and “lieux de memoire” play an important role in our lives.
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Background: Twinning collaborations, where two groups — from educational institutions, hospitals or towns — work together cross-culturally on joint goals, are increasingly common worldwide. Pairing up individuals, so-called twin pairs, is thought to contribute to successful collaboration in twinning projects, but as yet, there is no empirical evidence or theory that offers insight into the value of the pair relationship for twinning. Aim: To explore the contribution of one-to-one relationships between twins to twinning projects, as exemplified in projects between Dutch and Moroccan, and Dutch and Sierra Leone midwives. Methods: We conducted thirteen in-depth interviews with midwives from two twinning collaborations. Interviews were transcribed and analysed using an iterative, grounded theory process, yielding a theoretical understanding of one-to-one twinning relationships for twinning collaborations. Findings: Participant comments fell into four substantive categories: 1) Being named a twin, 2) moving beyond culture to the personal level, 3) searching for common ground to engage, 4) going above and beyond the twinning collaboration. Their interplay demonstrates the value of twin pairs in paving the way for successful twinning. Discussion: A complex combination of contextual inequities, personality, and cultural differences affect the twin relationship. Trusting relationships promote effective collaboration, however, as ‘trust’ cannot be mandated, it must be built by coaching twins in personal flexibility and (cultural) communication. Conclusion: By offering original insights into the ways twinning relationships are built, our research explores how twin pairs can enhance the success of twinning projects.
The transition towards an economy of wellbeing is complex, systemic, dynamic and uncertain. Individuals and organizations struggle to connect with and embrace their changing context. They need to create a mindset for the emergence of a culture of economic well-being. This requires a paradigm shift in the way reality is constructed. This emergence begins with the mindset of each individual, starting bottom-up. A mindset of economic well-being is built using agency, freedom, and responsibility to understand personal values, the multi-identity self, the mental models, and the individual context. A culture is created by waving individual mindsets together and allowing shared values, and new stories for their joint context to emerge. It is from this place of connection with the self and the other, that individuals' intrinsic motivation to act is found to engage in the transitions towards an economy of well-being. This project explores this theoretical framework further. Businesses play a key role in the transition toward an economy of well-being; they are instrumental in generating multiple types of value and redefining growth. They are key in the creation of the resilient world needed to respond to the complex and uncertain of our era. Varta-Valorisatielab, De-Kleine-Aarde, and Het Groene Brein are frontrunner organizations that understand their impact and influence. They are making bold strategic choices to lead their organizations towards an economy of well-being. Unfortunately, they often experience resistance from stakeholders. To address this resistance, the consortium in the proposal seeks to answer the research question: How can individuals who connect with their multi-identity-self, (via personal values, mental models, and personal context) develop a mindset of well-being that enables them to better connect with their stakeholders (the other) and together address the transitional needs of their collective context for the emergence of a culture of the economy of wellbeing?
Teachers have a crucial role in bringing about the extensive social changes that are needed in the building of a sustainable future. In the EduSTA project, we focus on sustainability competences of teachers. We strengthen the European dimension of teacher education via Digital Open Badges as means of performing, acknowledging, documenting, and transferring the competencies as micro-credentials. EduSTA starts by mapping the contextual possibilities and restrictions for transformative learning on sustainability and by operationalising skills. The development of competence-based learning modules and open digital badge-driven pathways will proceed hand in hand and will be realised as learning modules in the partnering Higher Education Institutes and badge applications open for all teachers in Europe.Societal Issue: Teachers’ capabilities to act as active facilitators of change in the ecological transition and to educate citizens and workforce to meet the future challenges is key to a profound transformation in the green transition.Teachers’ sustainability competences have been researched widely, but a gap remains between research and the teachers’ practise. There is a need to operationalise sustainability competences: to describe direct links with everyday tasks, such as curriculum development, pedagogical design, and assessment. This need calls for an urgent operationalisation of educators’ sustainability competences – to support the goals with sustainability actions and to transfer this understanding to their students.Benefit to society: EduSTA builds a community, “Academy of Educators for Sustainable Future”, and creates open digital badge-driven learning pathways for teachers’ sustainability competences supported by multimodal learning modules. The aim is to achieve close cooperation with training schools to actively engage in-service teachers.Our consortium is a catalyst for leading and empowering profound change in the present and for the future to educate teachers ready to meet the challenges and act as active change agents for sustainable future. Emphasizing teachers’ essential role as a part of the green transition also adds to the attractiveness of teachers’ work.
Everyone has the right to participate in society to the best of their ability. This right also applies to people with a visual impairment, in combination with a severe or profound intellectual and possibly motor disability (VISPIMD). However, due to their limitations, for their participation these people are often highly dependent on those around them, such as family members andhealthcare professionals. They determine how people with VISPIMD participate and to what extent. To optimize this support, they must have a good understanding of what people with disabilities can still do with their remaining vision.It is currently difficult to gain insight into the visual abilities of people with disabilities, especially those with VISPIMD. As a professional said, "Everything we can think of or develop to assess the functional vision of this vulnerable group will help improve our understanding and thus our ability to support them. Now, we are more or less guessing about what they can see.Moreover, what little we know about their vision is hard to communicate to other professionals”. Therefore, there is a need for methods that can provide insight into the functional vision of people with VISPIMD, in order to predict their options in daily life situations. This is crucial knowledge to ensure that these people can participate in society to their fullest extent.What makes it so difficult to get this insight at the moment? Visual impairments can be caused by a range of eye or brain disorders and can manifest in various ways. While we understand fairly well how low vision affects a person's abilities on relatively simple visual tasks, it is much more difficult to predict this in more complex dynamic everyday situations such asfinding your way or moving around during daily activities. This is because, among other things, conventional ophthalmic tests provide little information about what people can do with their remaining vision in everyday life (i.e., their functional vision).An additional problem in assessing vision in people with intellectual disabilities is that many conventional tests are difficult to perform or are too fatiguing, resulting in either no or the wrong information. In addition to their visual impairment, there is also a very serious intellectual disability (possibly combined with a motor impairment), which makes it even more complex to assesstheir functional vision. Due to the interplay between their visual, intellectual, and motor disabilities, it is almost impossible to determine whether persons are unable to perform an activity because they do not see it, do not notice it, do not understand it, cannot communicate about it, or are not able to move their head towards the stimulus due to motor disabilities.Although an expert professional can make a reasonable estimate of the functional possibilities through long-term and careful observation, the time and correct measurement data are usually lacking to find out the required information. So far, it is insufficiently clear what people with VZEVMB provoke to see and what they see exactly.Our goal with this project is to improve the understanding of the visual capabilities of people with VISPIMD. This then makes it possible to also improve the support for participation of the target group. We want to achieve this goal by developing and, in pilot form, testing a new combination of measurement and analysis methods - primarily based on eye movement registration -to determine the functional vision of people with VISPIMD. Our goal is to systematically determine what someone is responding to (“what”), where it may be (“where”), and how much time that response will take (“when”). When developing methods, we take the possibilities and preferences of the person in question as a starting point in relation to the technological possibilities.Because existing technological methods were originally developed for a different purpose, this partly requires adaptation to the possibilities of the target group.The concrete end product of our pilot will be a manual with an overview of available technological methods (as well as the methods themselves) for assessing functional vision, linked to the specific characteristics of the target group in the cognitive, motor area: 'Given that a client has this (estimated) combination of limitations (cognitive, motor and attention, time in whichsomeone can concentrate), the order of assessments is as follows:' followed by a description of the methods. We will also report on our findings in a workshop for professionals, a Dutch-language article and at least two scientific articles. This project is executed in the line: “I am seen; with all my strengths and limitations”. During the project, we closely collaborate with relevant stakeholders, i.e. the professionals with specific expertise working with the target group, family members of the persons with VISPIMD, and persons experiencing a visual impairment (‘experience experts’).
