Erasmus Programme

where the emphasis is much more on research as we don't have that many students as we used to have in the past.

So now it's more of a research position, although I must say that we're very active internationally, so we're part of... an international Erasmus Plus master's program, so we're happy to host students from around the world, which is a very fulfilling and inspiring thing to do.

There's a lot of exchange, a lot of mobility.

There is also the possibility for Macedonian students to go abroad.

This includes inking a new security partnership, joining the European Defense Fund, enhancing their trade deal, and the aforementioned Eurovision.

Other things Canada could do include joining the European political community, a planning group formed in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, or participating in the Erasmus Plus program that funds exchanges and mobility for university students.

Here's why it matters.

It's not yet clear what this new partnership will entail, but it could involve the creation of new mechanisms and legal tools to achieve the integration the two sides desire.

Uh, tell us where, uh, w- when you moved out of Ireland, what was going on in your life at the time?

Yeah, so I first moved, uh, for an Erasmus, uh, in 2017.

Uh, so I was 20.

I was in the closet.

the cliché, I guess.

And so off I went, uh-

And where did you go first for your Erasmus?

Uh, it was just outside Paris.

I was there in 2002.

I did an Erasmus exchange.

So that's a European program of mobility, an agreement between the different universities.

So you ship one student in one country and then the university ships another one back.

There's an interesting piece of work that was done fairly recently, which we published in the Curriculum Journal, which looked at this relationship between past experience and people's ability to form projective futures.

This was a study of teachers who did Erasmus Plus exchanges.

Now, having that experience in their biography, has enabled these teachers basically to envisage different possibilities for future practice, which wouldn't be in their, I suppose, their repertoire otherwise.

I think quite simply, having seen how other education systems operate, they have a wider range of ideas about how their own system might operate.

Concerning my teaching, there are many more students who are interested in the topic.

What I find very sad that my students are often coming as part of Erasmus exchange program with other European universities and when I ask them why do you come to study for one semester to Prague and why do you take two three classes on Israel so they tell me because they don't offer the same courses in our university so you know simply in many places they don't even want to teach about it because they are afraid of the topic so I teach I think the same way I just have to be ready for you know discussions which were much more emotional which are you know sometimes very very passionate so which is okay but I'm trying more than before October 7th basically to stress that this is academia, you can think whatever you want, but the debates must be based on facts, based on knowledge, and it must be civilized.

And 99% of the students are totally fine with it, and they want to do it this way.

And then there is this small group of students in almost any place in the world, maybe in lesser numbers in the Czech Republic, which want this attention by being radical, being loud, trying to cancel events about Israel.