2023
IQ-LAB
Lab for Community of Inquiry in a Global Citizenship
Vision & Goals
Establishing a global learning community
This project aimed to establish a community of inquiry focused on intercultural learning and global citizenship. It brought together initial teacher education students, research students, and faculty to co-design participatory action research integrated into teaching programs using digital technologies and virtual collaboration tools.
In the former projects, intercultural competencies were acquired, deepened, and transferred to other professional fields of action; IQ-Lab aimed at a qualitative transformation of collaborative teaching: These competencies were acquired on a case-specific basis and under controlled international conditions, taught in practice, and tested, optimized and consolidated on a field-specific basis.
Innovative Learning Labs for global collaboration
For this purpose, the organizational form of the laboratories was newly introduced, which, as a space of experiment, factor control, measurement, and testing, offered a particular framework for collecting data, developing tools from it, validating them, and distributing them.
Since the two partner universities from Romania and Australia already used Learning Labs, we had a unique opportunity to not only develop and deepen international and intercultural collaborations with IQ-Lab but also to continue learning from its international partners concerning the digitalization of teaching.
Transforming teacher education
with intercultural insights
IQ-Lab pursued the goal of developing a broad-based program of field-specific educational impulses and controlled educational processes for participants.
This included virtual, international, and intercultural formats, enabling forward-looking professionalization processes.
Cultural and aesthetic learning, global education, and the inclusion of ethnic minorities and indigenous populations were core components.
Extending collaborative learning globally
In this way, the case-based learning opportunities enabled forward-looking professionalization processes, just as the international contacts opened up learning processes that established the competence-oriented educational processes of future teachers in virtual and hybrid learning environments, validated in practical casework.
This happened through the already described practical work in the IQ-Labs, through international comparative evaluations as well as through continuous feedback loops, which offered optimizations and scalability for the individual students as well as for the educational setting developed as a model – into the university network and to further universities of the subject community.