Mobility for all students and staff is far from being a reality in Europe today. Mobility has the potential to provide a strong impetus on higher quality education, by bringing more students and staff from different backgrounds together in the classroom. Also, while meant to be a fundamental building block for a European identity, only a small elite are enjoying the fruits of multicultural learning and development. In order to increase student and staff mobility, the needs of students and staff themselves must be taken into account. In order to increase mobility, the European Students’ Union in partnership with Educational International, is developing a campaign; “Let’s Go!”, an awareness campaign running from November 2007 to October 2008.
Governments have underlined the importance of student and staff mobility in the Bologna Process and in other areas of work like Erasmus Mundus and the Lisbon strategy. The Bologna Declaration is firmly commited to this goal, following this up in later communiqués as recently as the one issued in London in 2007
Despite this, staff and students still experience substantial problems where mobility is concerned. Our Campaign aims at providing information on the benefits of mobility whilst pushing for the removal of barriers to mobility. The Campaign will motivate students and staff to go abroad and aims to convince higher education institutions and governments to overcome the obstacles to mobility.
The Campaign is part of the official 2007-09 working program of the Bologna Follow-Up Group and has received funding from the European Commission. This means that it will be recognised as work feeding into the preparations for the next ministerial conference to be held in 2009 in the frame of the Bologna Process. It also means that there is funding for some of the campaign materials and activities in the project.
The campaign will revolve around national activities such as debates, meetings with relevant authorities, articles, press releases and public demonstrations. Only our imagination set the limit for what we can do. On the European level we will create a project website including an interactive Wiki-style part where students and staff can exchange knowledge and mobility experiences. This will eventually it will serve as the grounding for identifying remaining concrete obstacles to mobility. We will create a template for campaign materials and support you with information and research regarding mobility. In order to formulate our demands we will create an online petition pinpointing our needs. The petition should also be distributed to national and European authorities.
The campaign will come to an end with a Validation Conference to be held in Lille in France, October 2008. The results of the campaign will be discussed and fed into a report to the Bologna Follow-up Group and ministerial conference in Leuven 2009.
An important feature of this campaign is that it will be carried out by both student unions and teacher trade unions. We have a common interest in making mobility possible and by joining forces we can only become stronger in our demands to solve mobility problems. This is a unique chance to show that we want to be mobile and we want a European Higher Education Area without barriers and borders.
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