LEARNING INTEGRATION-WORK THROUGH TRANSNATIONAL, DIGITALIZED COURSES

In both political discussions and integration assessments questions are often raised about social services role in inclusion for people of foreign descent. Such questions are highly relevant in a contemporary society that is characterized by growing social and cultural differentiation.

The overall aim of this presentation is to contribute to our understanding of how knowledge about integration work is developed by students who takes part in a webbased, transnational course where they use digital learning platforms for communication, coordination and organisation of learning activities. Analytically, such a focus is pursued employing a socio-cultural perspective on learning where practical actions and the design of the course have been scrutinized.

The motive for introducing a webbased transnational course in the area of integration was that there were an increasing amount of refugees migrating to Europe. Integration became a part of everyday work for a lot of professions, teachers, nurses and more. However, working with integration was not something that their professional education supported but they all expressed a need for more knowledge. But integration workers are assumed to have specific knowledge that is necessary to realize their work tasks.

In the work with creating an integration-course one conclusion was that all welfare work is generic, which means we cannot only look at the content of the work, instead one must put it into more multifaceted perspective that includes several professionals knowledge domains, service-organization assignment, legislations and cultures related. Simultaneously, another university had the same ideas, which resulted in a transnational webbased course with students from different professional fields. All students, as well as the teachers, where interviewed in the beginning and in the end of the course about their expectations about the content and the form.

The results demonstrate that using learning platforms to make sense in transnational education settings presupposes extensive knowledge of the indexicality of categories and concepts, something that could be assumed if the participants’ had a shared professional history. Instead, as the students have different backgrounds the teachers have to account for the local hermeneutics needed, and for the knowledge embedded in information and categories. It is in the process of reliving, creating and exposing the meaning of information, that students and teachers actually bring information in education to life.

In further development of transnational webbased courses it is important to not see this development as solely technical or organizational questions. To develop courses that increase the possibilities for students in different faculties with different routines etc. to make sense of information may be a much more demanding task than it seems to be. Such boundary-crossing teaching are nevertheless of great importance for the development of integration work as well as pedagogical competence in higher education.