Education through Migration. How the Experience of Living Abroad Can Be an Educational Factor

The experience of intercultural migration is one of the oldest forms of population movements. Through this phenomenon, different cultures come in contact, interaction and transformation. The individuals involved experience new ways of learning from the new cultures. I studied medical migration from Romania to the UK. The fact that medical migration is part of an intra-European highly skilled migration adds two distinctive notes. First, physicians are highly qualified and more aware of the cultural processes involved and second, the European culture, although sharing a rather small territory, has different values and socio-political particularities. The learning processes are continuous and may be not specific for migration. But education is it somewhat more. I will understand education as a learning process where the individual is made aware of the cultural differences, and his or her behaviour, perceptions, or basic values are changed (implying the representations of freedom, social and civil rights, dignity, solidarity, religion etc.).