European Migration: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

ended

We will establish a number of initiatives whose overall aim is to ground Oxford Brookes University as a promoter in the local area of integrated interdisciplinary work in European Migration. We will establish 1) a core undergraduate teaching course on ‘European Migration: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’; 2) a short summer course on ‘Challenges to European Migration’, for postgraduates and practitioners (members of civil society organisations, associations, civil servants, etc.); 3) several complementary activities offering discussion, reflection, and dissemination of knowledge on current dimensions of European migration, by involving different target groups to engage with the themes of the Jean Monnet Module. This project, though grounded within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of OBU, will be open to students from across the university. It will make current debates about European migration a central teaching concern for the Faculty, and a novel teaching channel into these issues for students in any of the University’s other Faculties. The core teaching (undergraduate course; summer school) will use innovative pedagogical techniques: student-centred and focussed on stimulating active learning, e.g. problem-based learning, structured discussions. All lectures on the teaching courses will be streamed live, and stored in open-access repositories. We will also establish an innovative one-semester teacher-training course in interdisciplinary methods, to ensure team members can exploit to the full the strengths of interdisciplinary approaches. A specific research project will evaluate the achievements of the core teaching. It will monitor the impact the teaching activities have in stimulating active learning and interdisciplinary knowledge on European Migration. The resulting output, a research paper, will inform the further, critical development of the principles of both active learning and interdisciplinary approaches in teaching European Migration.