The month-long leadership training in Bulgaria in June was one met with a challenge—the coronavirus that hit the globe in 2019; however, the upturn this year realized CTU’s first offline engagement across the Pacific.
Erasmus + Program made the all-expense-paid trip happen through the consortium of 16 universities in nine countries.
CTU, one of the three Philippine universities that benefited from it, received the green light from the leader Varna University of Management (VUM) in Bulgaria to conduct the much-anticipated student mobility paradigm.
Robert John Jopia (Danao), Kejay Tudtud (Danao), Rabbi Florentino (Danao), and Daisy Torino (Barili) took the flight on June 1 to meet with the rest of the participants at VUM.
“Yesterday was fun and great! Cebu Tech was tagged as bravest because we always wanted to speak first,” said the lone CTU graduate student Torino.
The selection protocol banked on each member-institution’s top 4 digital stories (from the many entries) declared before the pandemic.
Digital stories were requisites to attaining the intercultural passport issued to any student upon completion of the Intercultural Awareness Cultural Development and Massive Open Online Course (IACD-MOOC), one of the work packages indicated in the agreement.
At the camp’s culmination, participants were reminded to share their intercultural gleanings of the Erasmus+ FRIENDS mandate, raising the banner of unity amidst cultural diversity.
CTU delegates are expected to echo their experiences to the university’s 60,000 students as part of their re-entry plan. The University Director for Internationalization and ASEAN Integration hopes to engage them through a fireside chat before the year expires to materialize the directive.
The meeting of cultures was in line with the project: Furthering International Relations Capacities and Intercultural Engagement to Nurture Campus Diversity and Support Internationalization at Home (FRIENDS) backed by Erasmus+, a European Union (EU) program for non-EU institutions./IAI