Maja Ivanovic, MSc
Cultural Awareness in Times of Covid
Bio
Maja Ivanovic is a lecturer at the Croatian Defence Academy “Dr. Franjo Tudjman” in Zagreb, Croatia where she teaches several English courses at the undergraduate university programmes of Military Leadership and Management and Military Engineering.
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After finishing German and English Language and Literature Studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Osijek, she obtained Masters in Entrepreneurship at the Faculty of Economics at the same University.
Apart from working in the secondary education after completing her studies, she has also worked for 3 years as a teaching assistant at the Department of German Language and Literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Osijek. She also taught English at the Undergraduate Study of Nursing, University of Osijek.
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Maja’s professional interests include teaching enhancement by means of digital technologies and intercultural communicative competence and awareness, as a result of which she was one of the lecturers at the 1st Basic Military English module that took place at the Military Academy Amadora, Portugal under the umbrella of the Erasmus+ Programme in 2020.
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She has also participated in the organization of international cultural events while working in Osijek, Croatia and was one of the initiators and first coordinators of the festival “Days of Austrian Culture” in Osijek, which was the first festival of its kind organized in Croatia.
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Maja co-created and co-coordinated the international project “Cultural Awareness: HR and PT Military Academies Get Together in Times of Isolation” along with Sofia Menezes, PhD from the Military Academy Amadora, Portugal in the academic year 2020/2021.
Abstract
Keywords: Cultural Awareness, Synchronous Digital Tools, Asynchronous Digital Tools, Intercultural Communicative Competence, Intercultural Communication, Telecollaboration.
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The aim of this paper is to present insights obtained from an international project carried out between two military academies, i.e. the Military Academy in Amadora, Portugal (PT) and the Croatian Defence Academy in Zagreb, Croatia (HR).
The project “Cultural Awareness: HR and PT Military Academies Get Together in Times of Isolation” was a part of the English course at both academies which included third-semester cadets from both organizations during the academic year 2020/2021.
The main purposes of the project were:
(a) bolstering cadets’ cultural awareness through the creation of a digital multi-media setting for the exchange of communication and information
(b) enhancing cadets’ linguistic skills via the use of English as a lingua franca,
and (c) creating a final briefing where pairs of cadets/individual cadets had to present the key findings learned from their peers during the course of the project involving the customs, courtesies, and everyday life at their respective academies.
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The online environment was enabled by both asynchronous (email) and synchronous tools (video and text chat, video communication platforms, and applications including Whatsapp, Zoom, etc.).
The aforementioned telecollaboration tools facilitated the execution of a host of activities the cadets had to carry out to complete the project in times of a COVID-19 pandemic, which emphasized the need for extensive use of various digital tools in primary, secondary, and tertiary education.