45 employees of Yunus Emre Institute graduated from the Digital Training Course under the EU-Turkey Intercultural Dialogue Programme. Course attendees received their certificates during the graduation ceremony held on Monday, December 14.

The Digital Training Course organized under the EU-Turkey Intercultural Dialogue Programme (ICD), which was launched to establish a strong dialogue between Europe and Turkey, graduated its course attendees. The graduation ceremony for the Digital Training Course, which started in January 2019 under the EU-Turkey Intercultural Dialogue Programme, was held on Monday, December 14, 2020. 45 attendees received their certificates during the graduation ceremony.

Delivering the opening speech at the graduation ceremony, Bülent Üçpunar, Head of Strategy and Corporate Communications at Yunus Emre Institute, explained the development story of the project.

“We are about to complete the two-year implementation process as well as the concept development, preparation and implementation process that took about 6 years. EU-Turkey Intercultural Dialogue Programme, which hit the agenda of the Institute in 2014, was a project run by the Ministry of EU Affairs. The then Ministry of EU Affairs has now become Ministry of Foreign Affairs Directorate for EU Affairs. In 2018, we made the call for the project. Project meetings with broad participation were held in Ankara, Istanbul and Brussels. We have implemented this project since the beginning of 2019, after the preparation process which continued for a few years."

Stating that Yunus Emre Institute distributed grants to secondary and tertiary institutions in this project, Üçpunar said, “The team led by the Technical Assistance Team (TAT) offered technical assistance to the institutions to which grants were offered. This training was also a part of that assistance."

Stating that four major projects were carried out within the scope of the project, Üçpunar said that those projects were run by the British Council (Connect for Creativity Project), the French Cultural Center (Be Mobile-Create Together), the French Institute for Anatolian Studies (Europe’s Neolithic Bridge: Documenting and Disseminating the Neolithic Heritage of Anatolia) and the Hungarian Cultural Center (Diversity in Unity: Intercultural Dialogue Through the Waves of Danube), which are all EUNIC members, and that dozens of events were delivered both in Turkey and in the EU.

WHAT HAS BEEN COVERED DURING THE DIGITAL TRAINING UNDER THE ICD PROGRAMME?

Bülent Üçpunar expressed that much effort was put in the stages of developing the content, preparing the videos to deliver the content and organizing the webinar under the EU-Turkey ICD Digital Training Course. 

12 modules were developed for Intercultural Dialogue Training, and an online training platform was created. During the pandemic, the training continued non-stop thanks to the online training platform. 45 employees of the Institute working in Europe and Turkey enrolled in the programme. 13 live webinars were organized as part of the digital training programme. In total, 19 hours of live webinar trainings were delivered. 17 trainers and academicians from Portugal, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States delivered classes. Dr. Anastasia Nurzhynska, Dr. Carla Figueira, Simon Willams OBE, Musa Dağdeviren and Nermin Mollaoğlu contributed to the classes. 48 videos were shown, 6 PowerPoint presentations were delivered, 41 resources were presented, and 11 exercises and examinations were carried out during the training activities in which 60 people participated in total.

As part of the training, YEI employees paid a digital study visit to Brussels. The European Union Delegation to Turkey as well as Bernard Brunet, Head of Turkey Unit at the Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations, Culture Action Europe and the Finnish Cultural Institute contributed to the visit. A 2-hour webinar was held with the EUNIC.

During the 13 week programme from which 45 attendees graduated, 5 new intercultural dialogue projects were developed.