At the end of each year, the ICI team write a few words about what has happened during that year and usually we have a lot to say. This year it’s a bit different.
We managed to run three courses at the beginning of the year. The last one taking place in the first week of March. By then things had already started to look bad, especially for Italy where a group of participants had to cancel their participation because of the epidemic. It soon became apparent there would likely be no European courses for the rest of the year.
We offered (and still do) online follow-up courses for previous participants, which we are happy to say have been very well received by the enthusiastic participants. And, not to forget, we joined two new and interesting KA2 projects: Simply Included -
https://www.facebook.com/SimplyIncluded
and ITTS: International Teachers for Tomorrow’s Schools -
https://www.facebook.com/KA2.ITTS.Europe
This has been a challenging year for everyone. Teachers and trainers especially have been challenged with changing their teaching approaches almost overnight – not because they think these are better approaches for their learners but because they have had few alternatives to choose from and had to adapt to the circumstances. They have shown unbelievable flexibility, creativity and resilience which are all skills that our learners need for life. So thumbs up for teachers and trainers!
We now look optimistically to better times. We hope that the vaccine will make its magic and that we will see you or your colleagues or other teachers and trainers from all over Europe on our courses again next year. We will be prepared and ready and luckily, we are already getting questions and applications from schools and organizations that want to join us next year.
At the end of the year we often like to check our statistics (we are sociologists after all ????) We have sometimes sent out questioners to find out if our approaches have turned out to be useful to the participants and sometimes we go over the evaluation sheets again and post some encouraging words that we have seen there but this year we just looked at the numbers of participants through the years. Below you can see those statistics.
It is interesting to see how events in society are reflected in our numbers. In 2007, when the economic crisis started the numbers go down and again in 2014 when Erasmus+ took over from Grundtvig, Comenius and Leonardo programs and nobody really knew how to apply ???? and then of course 2020 is obvious.
We also checked the number of countries where the participants came from each year. One of the main changes over time is that the geographical diversity of participants was greater when applications were made by individuals rather than institutions.
We wish you all the best for 2021 in good health for you and your families and hopefully we will all continue to do our best to change the world together for the better!
ICI Team (Guðrún, Cherry and Sólveig)
