SOUTH AMERICA: Student Exchanges to Foster Mercosur Identity

• by Marcela Valente (buenos aires)
• Thursday, October 14, 2010
• Inter Press Service

The Mercosur Mobility Programme in Higher Education, a pilot project financed by the European Union, was launched Tuesday at an inaugural ceremony at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA).

Training for participating academics and officials will begin in December, and the first call for applications from students will be issued in 2011.

Fifty public and private universities in the four Southern Common Market (Mercosur) countries have already registered with the programme, and 12 training workshops have been planned for some 430 university professors and international cooperation officials.

Cristina García, a native of Uruguay and director of the project, told IPS that students from any university within the bloc are eligible for the student mobility programme, although the educational exchanges will take place at the higher education centres actively participating in the project.

Students will apply and be shortlisted at their own universities, but a commission made up of representatives from all four countries will be responsible for the final selection.

Scholarships, covering travel to another Mercosur country and study for one semester at one of the participating universities, will be provided to 180 selected students. The grant includes travel, accommodation, registration fees (if applicable) and other specified expenses.

Under the programme, the courses taken abroad will be accredited by the student's home university.

The project is intended to strengthen the sense of collective identification with Mercosur among the bloc's societies and citizens, which is weak according to a number of studies and polls.

In García's view, the programme could contribute to an awareness of belonging to the region's largest bloc, and encourage the building of collective citizenship, so that Mercosur may go beyond merely economic and commercial cooperation.

A survey, to be carried out among the university students before and after they take part in the programme, has been designed to find out whether the exchanges are useful for building a broader Mercosur identity.

An important precedent for the programme is the European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students (ERASMUS), which has funded exchanges of millions of EU students and professors since 1987, and has even included non-EU countries in the region.

Apart from academic benefits, the ERASMUS programme promotes European culture and identity, as well as collective citizenship transcending national allegiance to the 27 EU countries.

But in Mercosur, this is still a long way off. García admitted that the pilot stage of the programme covers only a minute proportion of the nearly four million students currently attending universities in the bloc.

'The next challenge will be to build up a substantially larger exchange programme, to ensure the continuity of the project and include a great many more students. For this to come about, the institutions involved will have to gain an appreciation of the positive value of the exchanges,' she said.

And this appreciation will have to be expressed in terms of funding. 'A student mobility programme cannot depend only on international donors. The institutions themselves will have to make commitments to a common scholarship fund,' García said.

The pilot programme, designed by UBA, is being supported by an EU contribution of three million euros (4.18 million dollars), with a further one million euros (1.4 million dollars) coming from the Mercosur countries.

The funds will mostly be spent on training for over 1,000 university professors and officials (2.84 million dollars), as well as on creating academic networks (1.04 million dollars) and publicity campaigns (349,000 dollars).

The exchanges themselves will cost 700,000 dollars. Because of this, the programme coordinators argue that the efforts devoted to training, at present the most costly component, should be capitalised on by following up with a longer term programme.

Marcelo Tobin, international relations secretary at UBA, who heads the project, told IPS that growing ties between the EU and Mercosur creates a favourable context for extending financial aid for the programme.

The two blocs resumed talks this year on a free trade agreement after a lapse of several years, and the outcome of the dialogue may be announced at the next Mercosur summit, scheduled for mid-December 2010 in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil.

If the pilot programme is successful, the next phase should involve much larger numbers of both universities and students.

'This should become Mercosur's grand mobility programme,' Tobin said, adding that UBA believes the initiative will bolster the sense of belonging to the bloc, on the grounds that 'culture and education are powerful builders of identity.'

His ultimate vision is for the programme to make a lasting contribution to 'opening minds, and to consistency between universities in the education they offer,' said Tobin, recalling that student mobility in the EU has been a decisive factor for social integration.

First, though, the pilot plan must be completed. The first training workshop for international cooperation officials from the education ministries of Mercosur countries will take place December in Montevideo.

December is also the deadline for receiving proposals for inter-university academic exchange networks, and training courses will continue through the first half of 2011. At that point, publicity campaigns will be launched to interest students in the programme.

Student applications will be invited in September 2011. Those who are selected will commence their semester of studies in another country of the bloc in March 2012, and by 2013 the pilot project is expected to reach completion.

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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