The project aims to investigate whether European societies have become more or less tolerant during the past 20 years. Bringing together empirical and theoretical findings, ACCEPT PLURALISM generates a State of the Art Report on Tolerance and Cultural Diversity in Europe targeting policy makers, NGOs and practitioners, a Handbook on Ideas of Tolerance and Cultural Diversity in Europe aimed to be used at upper high school level and with local/national policy makers, a Tolerance Indicators' Toolkit where qualitative and quantitative indicators may be used to score each country's performance on tolerating cultural diversity, and a book on Tolerance, Pluralism and Cultural Diversity in Europe, mainly aimed to anacademic readership.
The project includes direct communication with and input from policy makers, civil society, political and media actors for the dissemination and exploitation of its findings.
This project is coordinated by Professor Gabriella Klein at Università degli Studi di Perugia, Italy in partnership with colleagues from Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Malta, The Netherlands, Poland, and Turkey. Its overarching goal is to address the communication needs of "vulnerable 'adults-in-mobility' (AMs ) "during their formal or informal interactions with 'adults-professionally-in-contact-with-mobility' (ACMs) and to generate a change in "attitude toward mutual integration." Within the project, the three main categories in interaction are the AMs (new immigrants, refugees, etc.), ACMs (government employees, armed officers, police and border officers, etc.), and ICCs (trainers, mediators, educators, etc.) By creating accessible training resources, Bridge-It aims at facilitating improved linguistic and cultural understanding and more effective communication in institutional settings.
MERIDIUM is an international project whose goal is to investigate and evaluate linguistic policies adopted in countries of Mediterranean Europe, where ongoing immigration and emigration processes are observed. The project is coordinated by researchers at the University for Foreigners of Perugia, in collaboration with colleagues from universities in Malta, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Spain. The main goal is to examine the level of awareness about, and the attitudes towards, the use of various languages in the context of everyday interaction among members of the local and the migrant population. Worth noting is the interdisciplinary nature of the project, which brings together specialists in Applied Linguistics, Glottodidactics, Sociology and Intercultural Communication. A direct result of the project will consist in the creation of a Study and Documentation Centre about Multilingualism in the Mediterranean Europe, hosted by the University for Foreigners in Perugia.
The goal of ELP is to achieve an integrated language policy oriented towards the recommendations and objectives of the Council of Europe and the European Union. The newly developed ELP for children aged 3 to 7 is being offered to day-care institutions in a slip case containing material for children as well as the manual for educators. Further work is being carried out to adjust integrative language education approaches to educational institutions (especially early childhood education) which utilize multilingual and multicultural resources in order to develop communicative and intercultural skills.
