When I arranged to speak with Adrian Pilbeam about the intercultural training courses he offers I was surprised to find out that you could get EU support with your expenses to attend. Not that I am unfamiliar with the Grundtvig scheme which pays for adult educators to attend 5 day courses in EU countries since I had benefitted from the scheme myself a few years ago. But what surprised me was that I thought that courses had to be based on previous Grundtvig projects and I also thought that the only courses which you could get support for were the ones listed in the Grundtvig database. But it turns out that if you are a EU citizen and want to attend a course in another EU country which is relevant to your work there is the chance that your National Agency will approve a grant to support your costs of accommodation, transportation and course fees. Pilbeam himself did not realise this until he started attracting course participants who told him about the scheme.
The course, offered by LTS training, is designed for experienced trainers from fields such as language training, communication skills training and management training, who wish to learn more about the theory and practice of intercultural training, both to integrate intercultural topics into their current training and also to deliver their own intercultural training courses. There is now also a follow up course entitled ‘Designing and Delivering Intercultural Training’ for those who want to explore the topic in more depth.
You can hear more about the course in the latest show of Absolutely Intercultural which also includes a chat with Richard Wood of Verge, a company based in China, which aims to promote what they term ‘comfortable communication’. The phrase describes how you feel when you have cracked the intercultural code and can be at ease with people from another culture.