3. MODULE 3: KEY POINTS TO REMEMBER

Guidance practitioners' roles in mobility
  • It can be challenging for counsellors to take a pro-active role in motivating less resourceful students. However, this broadens access to mobility and it is a way to help students grow.
  • Types of pre-mobililty preparation include linguistic, educational, curricular, mental, and cultural.
  • The W-curve is a model that describes the emotional and cognitive reactions to an intercultural experience and can be used for guiding the student both before and after the mobility.
  • The "re-entry worm" is another model that can be used in counselling both before and after the mobility period. This is a reversed W-curve aimed at preparing the student for the reversed culture-shock when returning home.
  • When abroad, the mobility participants have to take greater responsibility for their own learning and may therefore also need support for their learning process, through some follow-up measures.
  • The guidance process after the mobility period includes guidance on what to take on board, what steps to take next and how to use the new competences in the future.
How can the quality of the mobility process be improved?
  • The benefits of undertaking learning mobility go beyond intercultural awareness and can include development of personal competences, active citizenship and employability of participants.
  • Guidance counsellors who are aware of and believe in the added value of mobility for the individual, have the potential to make use of mobility as a tool to strengthen individuals and develop their skills and competences.
Valuable tools for support
  • In the Europass portal, students contemplating mobility, can create a profile in 29 languages and use it when writing their application.
  • The European Qualifications Framework (EQF) is a translation tool to make national qualifications easier to understand and more comparable.
  • Through the Euroguidance website, it is possible to look up the "study in …" webpages for all European countries.
  • There are also privately owned resources, such as bachelorsportal.com and mastersportal.com, which display information submitted by education institutions worldwide that wish to be advertised.