Vilnius University Students and Lecturers Will Implement New Twinning Activities

Vilnius University will receive funding to initiate five new collaboration actions with other Arqus Alliance members in the framework of the Arqus Twinning programme. These Twinning activities are part of the 2nd Arqus Twinning call that was launched from 13th December to 1st February 2022.

Three of the five selected mobilities have been prepared with colleagues from Granada, Graz and Padua to work jointly on sustainability in public regulation, gender studies and early childhood education. All selected teams will consist of 1 teacher and 3 to 6 students, moving to another partner institution within the same subject area. Students and teachers will participate in two regular Twinning activities by meeting physically and in one blended Twinning activity, including some online elements and cooperation before the meetings.

The very first Twinning activity will take place at the University of Graz. Participating students will analyze sustainability and technology challenges in public regulation (RegTech) and court proceedings.

The second Twinning activity in Granada aims to implement a small-scale pilot project for cooperation in the field of gender studies.

And the third selected blended Twinning initiative is devoted to comparing two distinct Early Childhood Education and Care Systems (split and integrated) in two different countries (Lithuania and Italy) and conducting research in schools involving teachers, parents, and students.

The above-selected Twinning activities are directly related to the main idea of Arqus Twinning: to strengthen the subject-related collaboration of staff and students and create possibilities to carry out joint learning and teaching activities through piloting short-term mobility schemes with a priority in Social Sciences & Humanities (SSH) and STEM disciplines.

There are already successful examples of Twinning activities initiated by Vilnius University or in which this University has participated. Lecturer of the Faculty of Philology, Dr. Joana Šinkūnienė, and a group of students recently implemented a blended Twinning activity. Firstly, they were involved in online activities where students were participating in lectures together with Spanish students and then visited the University of Granada from 28th March to 1st April.

During the project, Lithuanian and Spanish students learned about the principles of linguistics, language learning & translation. Also, they discussed features of tourism language, problems in translating, cultural differences, and cultural conceptualization. Finally, students could try software used for translation and text analysis. Overall, participants achieved significant results; they prepared tourist brochures about Granada, established valuable connections with other colleagues at the University of Granada and set guidelines for further cooperation.