Eut+ Women Wednesdays - Sonia Munteanu

Associate Professor Sonia Munteanu, PhD, is task liaison in UTCN for T2.1, Thriving in Multilingualism and Multiculturalism. Her background is in teaching English and Romanian as foreign languages and as languages for specific purposes, English for Teaching and intercultural communication. She strongly believes that diversity of languages and cultures is a great competitive advantage of EUt+ students and staff and that professional competences in engineering can be greatly enhanced by fostering multilingualism and multiculturalism. Therefore, EUt+ graduates will be supported and encouraged to expand and use their full linguistic repertoire and cultural knowledge to become responsible and effective agents of change in European society. This part of the project in which she is involved is focused on inclusiveness and the embeddedness because EUt+ will be open to every citizen, all will feel equally welcome, understood, and taken care of. Immersive technologies will allow EUt+ to transcend physical and economic constraints, empowering students to easily access its multicultural and plurilingual richness. Students and staff will be able to freely move from one country to another having been exposed to the multicultural environment through immersive technologies.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) will enable students to access learning in multiple accessible forms to overcome any remaining language or cultural barriers. Professor Munteanu embraces a vision of multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary in education, approaches that can prepare graduates for the challenges they will face in their professions. She is working closely with research teams in T3.4, contributing to designing and testing learning models, teaching methodologies, innovative pedagogical devices, and sharing practices and knowledge to consolidate innovative methods in pedagogy. She is committed to EUt+ values of humanism and openness and to its vision of technology that is human-centric and society-driven.