This student exchange programme of 30 credits is organized in the spring semester. It offers an interdisciplinary, innovative, international and intercultural approach within the field of Social Educational Care Work.
Exchange experiences have broad, long-lasting benefits and positive outcomes for students. This programme focuses on interprofessional collaboration, interactive connection, creativity through co-design, community based support, participation in an international and intercultural network. These skills are essential for every orthopedagogical professional in working in a complex and superdiverse context with vulnerable people of all ages and with a variety of disabilities to improve quality of live through quality of care.
All courses in the programme are taught in English and are open for Belgian and international students. The programme stimulates exchange and collaboration between Social Educational Care Work or Social Work students from different countries, offering an arts-based research learning lab, a spring school, guest lectures and study visits.
Practical info
- Welcome days: 6 & 7 February 2025
- Start of the programme: 10 February 2025
- Start of exams: 19 May 2025
- End of semester: 27 June 2025
Questions about the content of the program?
Contact your International Academic Coordinator: ann.bens@hogent.be
Practical questions?
Contact your Incoming Student Advisor: incoming@hogent.be
This programme offers the following courses during the spring semester for a total of 30 credits
This course focuses on human rights with a focus on community development in an international perspective. Central questions in this olod are:
- How to use the human rights framework in social pedagogical professions?
- How to elaborate the human rights framework in the local community: e.g. WGC; community development
- In what way can the human rights framework be supportive to reflect on themes such as: ethnicity, gender, poverty, disability,....
- Are human rights universal? How are human rights dealt with internationally?
Important decisions on whether and how to prevent drug abuse, criminal behaviour and violence are too often made based on shallow grounds.
Social workers and health promotors need to have a grasp on the science base of prevention. They need the capacity to translate it to the floor of practice addressing not only youth in schools, but also adults in the workplace or people in the community.
Peer van der Kreeft leads a European network of researchers and practitioners establishing a standardized training model on prevention.
The robust training is delivered to the students in an interactive way.
Teaching methods
Lectures, workshop
It is appropriate to justify why this course was included in the programme. Flanders and Europe have been the subject of different historical migrations and form a community of different cultures.
We live in a multicultural society. Moreover, the increasing economic globalization and the development of new and faster forms of transport and communication have caused distance and time to shrivel. The world has become a "global village". The care worker is increasingly confronted with people from different cultural backgrounds and should handle those differences properly and be aware of his own "cultural" glasses.
The course is based on the TOPOI model. TOPOI is the abbreviation of language, structure, persons, organization and effort. These are the five areas in which cultural differences and misunderstandings can take place. The TOPOI model includes a practical analysis and intervention framework to detect and deal with these cultural differences and misunderstandings in an intercultural contact.
In this course we will focus on the shifts in care and support of people in vulnerable living situations. The concept of ‘Quality of Life’ is presented as an intersectoral framework, across target groups in the daily support of people in vulnerable living situations. More and more attention is given to active involvement of the client and his/her network with their needs, wishes and supports as starting point.
These evolutions are influenced by the the socio-ecological model of health, inclusive citizenship as outcome measure and a focus on human rights in the care and support of people in vulnerable living situations.
In this course students get insight in the history of the concept Quality of Life, the different models of Quality of Life and the support paradigm as a way to implement Quality of Life in daily practice. Attention is given to the implications of implementing this Quality of Life framework for professionals working in the orthopedagogical field.
The course unit supports a potential integration of the treated content into professional activities either during an internship or in the field in the future
As a future educator you will have to work with your own skills/abilities and restrictions. You are your own working instrument. So first of all it is important that you learn to explore, discover and controle this instrument.
Once this first exploration ( of your own working instrument) is achieved, you can continue further exploration. It is an important basic attitude that you challenge yourself to experiment with the two fields/disciplines ‘Visual expression’ and ‘Music and movement’. This must be your own initiative. Hereby, we would like to stimulate your problem-solving abilities.
In this search of the concrete creation/design of your own non-verbal, creative (and expressive) communication, you can discover for yourself the forces/powers of both fields/disciplines. At the end of this course there will be (time for) feedback and reflection on/at one’s own learning process.
This course consists of the following components:
- meetings with students from other programs to elaborate on a case within an interdisciplinary team
- developing meeting techniques
- developing knowledge and understanding of responsibilities and vision of other disciplines
- developing a treatment through the perspective of the student’s own discipline
- drawing up common treatment goals and an individual treatment plan.
Co-design (co-creation) is a form of experiential learning in which we, together with stakeholders, create opportunities in complex situations. Every limitation (in possibilities, resources, time, mandate) is an opportunity for creativity. By trying out and failing as an opportunity, the solution becomes tangible. In doing so, together we build up 'locally situated knowledge' that is much more useful than 'expert knowledge'.
All this is applied to the context of inclusion and participation. In this way, inclusion and participation are further conceptualised together. Students are included in the most important concepts of co-design: flow, surprise (expected the unexpected), design paradox, iteration and prototyping. They are trained through exercises to work efficiently and methodically themselves and thus facilitate co-creation processes in situations where 'impossibility' threatens to take over.
ABR: Students become familiar with practice-based research from a doctor-based research perspective. ABR is an extensive field of opportunities for qualitative research and lends itself perfectly to contexts where social justice is under pressure. It is a form of qualitative research in which art and science are consciously interwoven. The artistic angle can be used in the data collection, the analysis and/or the representation of the research.
The students receive theory, examples (from research with all kinds of target groups) and practice in the application. In this semester, they start working with their own chosen research question or a question from the supply. They are supported to go through all the steps of ABR and complete a short practical research. In this part, we work together with musicians, so that the artistic (image, word, dance, music, performance, ...) can also be strongly supported.