Language Centre tutors during International Project Week in the Netherlands

On 28-31 January 2025, our English teachers, Grażyna Budzińska, MA, and Izabella Łacińska-Wójcik, MA, took part in International Project Week. This mobility opportunity allowed them to exchange experiences with other participants acting as tutors/mentors from countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, and to conduct classes based on a project-based approach to finding solutions to real-life problems. The classes were conducted by Ms Izabella every day with three teams of students, eight people each.

Due to the multinational nature of the event, both in terms of the profile of the mentors and the students participating in the teams, she gained new experience of working in a multicultural environment, thus contributing to the development of the internationalisation process and increasing the mobility of teaching staff.

A pro-student policy was implemented to provide informational and logistical support to female students of the Lodz University of Technology participating in the project. Our staff held a series of meetings with colleagues from the Language Centre, sharing their observations and comments on the organisation of intensive project classes, which were the tasks carried out in the project during their stay at Saxion University of Applied Sciences in Enschede.

The scale, momentum and finale are impressive – the entire logistical side of Project Week allows the work of students to be correlated with companies that face real problems, and this is on a huge scale of over a thousand students, providing an impressive cross-section not only of diversity, but also of multiculturalism, with a wide spectrum of personalities and roles assumed in group work. Ms Izabella's observations confirmed the high effectiveness of focusing on a specific PBL task during the week, as the results of the intensive involvement exceeded the company's expectations.

Izabella Łacińska-Wójcik: "It was a real pleasure. I am convinced that extending the same projects over time would not yield such excellent results, so by comparing the effects of SSU with Intro to PBL, I gained confidence in the greater added value of the experience for students in the case of one-week courses within Study Skills for University."