UNITA is aware that many of its objectives, such as creating flexible and personalized curricula, fostering civic engagement, introducing innovative pedagogies, achieving sustainable impact and blue growth and increasing entrepreneurial mindsets and international competitiveness, will only be achieved through a strong inter-university long cooperation term.
This led us to design and launch UNITA International cooperation strategy: "GEMINAE", on the 15th of September. After the invitation of all UNITA rectors to the selected non-European Universities, the introduction to the program was done by Stefano Geuna Rector of UNITO and was presented in three of the languages of the alliance: French, Portuguese and Spanish. This multilingual approach is one of the core elements of this Internationalization strategy that aims to foster the multilingualism fostering by using romance languages in all the spheres of university life to enhance linguistic diversity and promote inclusion.
This will lead to increasing the awareness and acceptance of linguistic and cultural diversity. Through the Geminae program, UNITA cooperation with universities outside the European Union aims to create a network of best practices that search innovation giving special relevance to the challenges that rural and cross-border regions are facing.
Cooperation is seen in its broader terms, it includes traditional mobilities and innovative ones, such as online, blended or rural mobilities, but cooperation will also include new collaboration initiatives in research, teaching, administration and governance.
This cooperation will start with key areas of UNITA, such as the research hubs in Circular Economy, Renewable Energies and Cultural Heritage or the Inter-comprehension programs. Initially 30 universities of America, Asia and Africa have been invited, but this network is born to be expanded.
The identification of best practices will be the basis for a biannual conference that will award the most innovative and relevant best practices identified. This project is also possible thanks to the cooperation with our associate partners, in particular, Campus Iberus, OEI and AUF, that supported us in the presentation of the program.
After the initial launch of the program, during the next months, different projects and initiatives will be presented to make this cooperation active, fruitful and enriching. Stay tuned for our Geminae Research Workshops, Staff weeks, Mobility programs and inter-comprehension courses.
