Soulbus - Building Social Capital by Improving Multicultural Competence in Higher Education and Labour Market

The aim of the Soulbus project is to build social capital between HEIs and labour market. The project enhances mutual communication and strengthens trust while teachers and mentors are working in tandem to meet current and future challenges of multiculturalism. The target group comes from the fields of education, rehabilitation and social & health care. Specifically, the project will (i) describe and share national practices related to multicultural competence and identify good practices in the learning process of foreign students in practical placement, (ii) develop and implement the 100 % virtually based Multicultural coaching programme for the mentors and the teachers, (iii) produce and pilot the tailored actions for the guidance of foreign students in each of the partner countries and peer-learn the pilots aiming at sharing innovations and creative solutions that can be incorporated into national curricular activities.

The project's output are designed to achieve three aims: to improve teachers' and mentors' multicultural competence in order to increase the volume of placements available to foreign students and harmonize the quality of placements; to improve attractiveness and accessibility of the practical placements for the foreign exchange and degree students as a part of the HEIs' curricular activities; and to support systematic, long-term collaboration between HEIs and working life partners.

The methodological framework is based on mentors & teachers working in pairs as an part of iterative development cycle. The idea is to develop the Multicultural coaching programme through repeated cycles and in small increments. The developers (mentors & teachers) take advantage of what was learned during the development of earlier stages. The key steps in the process start with an analysis of the present situation and iteratively enhance the evolving programme until it is ready to disseminate and be further exploited by partners and wider learning audience.