De-escalating Polarization in Europe

The CQ+ Project Consortium embarked on a mission to enhance cultural intelligence (CQ) across Europe, recognizing culture as a defining aspect that shapes behavior, belonging, motivation, and efficacy. CQ surpasses cultural sensitivity, emphasizing the skills essential for successful navigation of diverse cultural contexts. With European identity grounded in cultural diversity, the project aimed to cultivate tolerance and CQ skills among citizens amidst rising racism, xenophobia, and hate crimes. The imperative to counteract division and protect values of peace and acceptance fueled the consortium's determination. Identifying an unmet need, the project focused on creating targeted educational materials for citizens and adult learners to develop CQ, countering racism and prejudice. To facilitate this, a CQ+ in-service training program for adult educators was devised, integrating CQ as a continuous skill requiring improvement. The program addressed pedagogic practices and didactic skills for online learning environments, aligning with the central needs of enhancing cultural understanding and combating intolerance.

The overall objective of the CQ+ project is to address polarization in Europe by supporting adult learners of all ages, abilities, professions and background to develop their cultural intelligence and appreciation and tolerance of diversity. We achieve this through the development of a comprehensive package of training supports that address adult educators as the facilitators of community-based, informal and non-learning and learning resources that directly engage adult learners interested in developing their cultural intelligence. The business case for promoting diversity and inclusion has never been more compelling as we emerge from a post-COVID era, as ultimately having more diverse communities and organisations and building inclusive cultures through the development of citizen-level cultural intelligence is in the end about addressing inequality, which is a central tenet of the new Erasmus+ Programme and EU social policy. We live in a world with exponentially increasing connectivity across all sectors, communities, businesses, classrooms and individuals alike. With global collaboration becoming progressively instrumental for social and economic success, cultural intelligence is now more important than ever in our daily lives.

The following activities were actioned by the project consortium during the 24-months of the project: Action 1 – establish local advisory committees to ensure that the input and perspectives of key local stakeholders & associate partners are integral to the project work plan and development approach. Each partner decided if they did this in a formal setting or through informal interactions. Action 2 - design, develop, test, revise, translate and produce a toolkit of 20 Interactive Infographic resources to build Cultural Intelligence amongst a diverse range of adult learner groups based on the proposed Cultural Intelligence model Action 3 - design, develop, test, revise, translate and produce a needs-led tailored in-service training programme for frontline educators to support them to work in culturally diverse and online learning environments Action 4 - create the CQ+ MOOC & Community of Practice using appropriate and accessible web-based environments and media platforms Action 5 - implement in-service training with front-line educators through a cascading model of training Action 6 - pilot and implement the Toolkit of Interactive Infographics and the MOOC & Community of Practice with the project target groups Action 7 - animate, share and promote the project results extensively at local, regional, national and EU level through our extensive network of contacts, associate partners and adult education stakeholders Action 8 - measure the impact of the project on our target groups and inform policy debates based on our practical implementation experience Action 9 – host multiplier events to engage key target groups and stakeholders locally in order to share the project results and promote the transfer and use of them in diverse learning settings and online learning environments Action 10 - network adult learners, adult educators and service providers transnationally via the proposed Community of Practice incorporating a European dimension into our project results and sustain this platform for a further 5 years after the active funding period of the project.

The CQ+ Project delivered the following 3 project results: 1.) CQ+ Toolkit of Interactive Infographics for build cultural intelligence 2.) In-service Training Programme for Front-line Adult Educators that develops their pedagogic practice and didactic skills to facilitate learning in multi-cultural and digitised learning environments 3.) CQ+ MOOC and Community of Practice that ensures the project results of CQ+ are widely available to significant sectors of adult education and opportunities for Pan-European collaboration are fostered and achieved. In addition, we delivered the following KPIs over the lifetime of the project: - 77 adult educators completed the in-service training and start to integrate the new resources into their day-to-day teaching practice (target 54) (note this includes some learners as well as Blenders, Squaredot and KMOP combined their PR1 and PR2 piloting; - 52 adult learners joined the PR1 Interactive infographic country pilots; - 20 Interactive Infographics were developed to support the development of cultural intelligence amongst adult learners, young people and EU citizens to build their knowledge and competences in this critical skill - 164 adult learners, adult educators and front-line professionals, etc., attending the multiplier events in BE, IE, DE, PT, ES, CY, AT and CZ (Target was 160) - 26 adult education managers and trainers, community leaders, integration workers and trainers, adult learners, academics, policy makers, etc., attended the Final Conference in Belgium on October 24 when the CQ+ project and all its results were presented and when all partners presented their experiences in their local setting. An additional 70 participants were present at the keynote of Blenders on the “Impact Into Play” event earlier in October. Target reach was 70. - There was a target of 200 registered members of the Community of Practice. This we could not exactly track as we removed the requirement to register in order to make the Community of Practice more accessible. We know however that the CQ+ MOOC was visited by 321 users.