Oct. 11th, 2018, the international conference: "How to Find Oneself in Diversity? Contemporary Understanding and Findings on Youth Identity" was held in Vilnius, Lithuania. The event brought together youth scholars from Italy, France, Poland, Romania, the Netherlands, and Lithuania to discuss factors and resources that contribute to youth identity development, as well as present the outputs of the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership Project: Innovative Curriculum for Strong Identities in Diverse Europe (INSIDE).
An audience of over 100 school psychologists, teachers, youth workers, and education policy makers from Lithuania, as well as Ukraine, Latvia, Russia, Spain, and Finland got to know about three intellectual outputs of the INSIDE project. The first one, SIDE curriculum, presents study materials and resources for a university-level course on youth identity development. During the project, the SIDE curriculum has been developed and tested in an intensive university course on youth identity. Finalized curriculum is now publicly available for further use in universities and beyond.
The second output of the INSIDE project includes two compendiums of scholarly papers on youth identity development in Europe, published in two leading peer-reviewed journals. One of them is in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence (2018, 47/4), where a special section “Developing identities: Individual and social resources” has been prepared under the project. The other compendium is integrated in the fourthcoming issue of the European Psychologist (2018, 23/4), with two reviews on different aspects of youth identity development prepared under the project.
Finally, the third intellectual output of the INSIDE project aims to make the latest research findings on youth identity easily accessible to non-academic audiences, including educational practitioners, policy makers, and youth organizations. An online resource I-TOOLS was prepared with popular videos, interviews with scholars, as well as other evidence-based resources for those interested in youth identity development.
All three resources developed during the INSIDE project are closely inter-related in terms of topics covered and perspectives on youth identity applied, and they are all open for public use. The materials can be accessed online through the official website of the project https://inside.mruni.eu.
INSIDE partners include: University of Bologna (Italy); University of Bordeaux (France); Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw (Poland); Babes-Bolyai University (Romania); Tolerant Youth Association (Lithuania); and Kaunas University of Technology (associated partner; Lithuania), along with Mykolas Romeris University (coordinator, Lithuania).