ProHarkka Sisä-Suomi – Guidance on language and culture awareness training in the social and health care sector

Strengthening the diversity of work communities and supporting students’ integration into working life

ProHarkka Sisä-Suomi responds to the growing number of multilingual students in higher education in the social and health care sector, as well as to the challenges they face during their practical training. Previous projects and discussions with wellbeing services counties have identified the need to strengthen competence in linguistically and culturally responsive supervision, the need for new training models, and the dissemination of good practices.

The main goal of the project is to strengthen social and health care organisations as multicultural work communities and to develop linguistically and culturally responsive supervisory skills through regional collaboration. This will be achieved by developing and piloting a language mentor model based on Sweden’s språkombud system. Language mentors support the Finnish language learning of students and employees with foreign-language backgrounds and promote language-aware practices.

The project will also create a method for observing language use situations and assessing Finnish language proficiency, and strengthen the competence of practical training supervisors through training, orientation materials, and the design of simulations. The project develops and evaluates multicultural training models that support socially safe learning environments and an inclusive supervisory culture. This includes combining individual, pair and modular training with language mentor activities. In addition, the project will develop digital supervisory materials and formulate recommendations for an inclusive supervisory culture.

A key part of the project is strengthening regional cooperation and networking between universities of applied sciences, wellbeing services counties, and other stakeholders. The aim is to establish student supervisor and language mentor networks and to create unified practices.