The project “Intercultural perspectives on Information Literacy” aims to develop a transnational learning offer for the promotion of students’ information literacy. The project initially pursues the goal of establishing a common learning space in which students from different countries can learn together and thus fundamentally build up intercultural competence. The learning offer deals with the subject area of information competence.
The idea is to substantially expand one’s own image of the information environment through discourse and joint knowledge development with learners from other cultures. In this way, in addition to intercultural competence, information competence is to be qualitatively raised to a level that goes beyond the understanding of local conditions and contexts.
This project has evolved from a cooperation between Hildesheim University and Symbiosis International University Pune which has existed for 8 years. So far, they have worked together through student mobility and, on a smaller scale, faculty mobility. Dr. Tessy Thadathil is the head of this project in Pune. In the last few semesters, the first joint courses were held online.
“Intercultural perspectives on Information Literacy” builds on an already exploratively tested format. In the winter semester 2019/2020, the project course “Indian-German perspectives on Information Literacy” was conducted. This course was attended by 14 students from Pune and 7 students from Hildesheim. The course was led by the project leader and the project partner and additionally co-supervised by a research assistant. The course was evaluated very positively by the students. The learning scenario was presented at the second conference of the project “Information Literacy and Democracy (IDE)” in June 2020. The idea of expanding the circle of cooperation partners to other countries was raised and initial contacts with potential further cooperation partners were explored.
It is the project’s aim to expand, optimise and continue the format “Intercultural perspectives on Information Literacy”.
In the winter term 2021/2022 another project course takes place and continues the cooperation. The course is held as a transnational online course, which is titled “Intercultural Perspectives on Information Literacy and Metaliteracy”. This time experts from Germany, Bosnia-Herzegovina, India, USA and Austria attend as instructors and supervise the students who are participating in the course. Collectively the course is attended by 5 students from Germany, 7 from Bosnia-Herzegovina, 15 from India, 4 from USA and 1 student from Austria.
Click to see the poster of the project course (winter semester 2021/2022):
Again, in the winter term 2022/2023 the cooperation resumes in form of the project course “Intercultural Perspectives on Information Literacy and Metaliteracy: A transnational online course”. Partners from Germany, Bosnia-Herzegovina, India and USA will educate the students.
Funding
IPIL (“intercultural perspectives on Information Literacy”) was a funded project by the German Academic Exchange Service / Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research / Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) within the call “international Virtual Academic Collaboration (IVAC)” in the year 2020 to 2021.