International Week

The International Week is an annual happening among students and lecturers on the study programmes for Social Services, Occupational Therapy and the English Nursing programme. We always connect an important topic to the week, and this year it was ethics. During the week the students are discussing and reflecting in smaller workshop groups with the student fellows from different areas and with different cultural background on issues related to ethical issues. We focus on a Nordic perspective. During this week we have had guest lecturers visiting Arcada from Sweden and Denmark.

Mehrdad Darvishpour who is a senior lecturer at Mälardalen University in Eskilstuna was one of our guests. Mehrdad was lecturing about Intersectionality in Social Work and in meeting the Client, and The Welfare State’s ‘Stepchildren’- An intersectional perspective on ethnic relations and discrimination in Sweden. The guest from Denmark was Lena Knudsmark from the University College Syddanmark. Lena’s topics were Analysing ethical dilemmas in cultural encounters, and The Narrative Construction of Reality in the Perspective of Discourse Ethics. Other guest lecturers this week were Tiina & Jukka Kumpuvuori with the topic Right to Fertility Treatment – a Right for everyone or for the Bold and Beautiful only? Universal Design was opened up by Ira Jeglinsky-Kankainen, and Anna Caldén was telling her experiences about My Everyday Life – Accentuating Independence through Assistance.

Our international week ended up on Friday with a seminar when the students were presenting a topic that they could choose from one of the themes that had been discussed in the smaller groups during the week. The feed-back from the students after the week showed that they had a really nice week and thought it had been fun to work together with people from different programs and to get to know each other. We also got useful feedback about things to consider and plan better for another year. The workshops had been interesting specially to see different point of views, and there was so much going on and everybody had learned a lot. Especially the creative approach with some new ways of presenting things, such as singing and drama was appreciated. Those from the Swedish speaking programs said they can now speak English more openly now when they have done it for a week. The students said afterwards that they had all developed new friendships during this week for the whole of their studies.

/the teacher team Marina, Denice. H, Denise. V and Rut

The photos are from the students’ presentations on the seminar. Also some photos of the teacher team and the guest lecturers.