Examples of inclusive approaches developed within the project
A tutor buddy in Padua spends a Saturday walking a new student around the city before term even starts. A lecturer in Zagreb spends her own evening translating a Ukrainian academic transcript so she can actually judge what a student already knows, rather than guessing. A seminar in Istanbul gets deliberately split into mixed teams so that language stops being the main obstacle to finishing group work. None of these are written into an official strategy. All three came directly from the people doing them, described first-hand in the UkraStud focus groups.
The most fully worked-out version of this is Padua’s tutor buddy scheme. A senior student or recent graduate takes on one or two international students for a semester: helping with paperwork, showing them round the city, explaining how exams actually work in practice, not just on paper. All three Padua sessions raised the same concern about it, independently. The model runs on personal motivation. Give one tutor too many students, or too much responsibility, and it collapses into exactly the kind of unpaid, informal caseload that leads to burnout.
Zagreb staff were the most direct about the risk. Six participants, most with decades of teaching experience, described a university with no official mentoring programme for Ukrainian students at all. Support existed only where an individual lecturer personally felt responsible and found the time.
“Much depends on the individual engagement of the teacher” – the line Zagreb staff used to sum up a university with no official mentoring programme for Ukrainian students.
IEU in Kyiv described the most institutionalised version among the five sites. A mentor there sits at the centre of a small network, coordinating between the international office, the psychological service, and the career centre, rather than trying to cover all three roles alone. Staff were specific about why it works: the mentor has formal status, a defined workload, and backing from the administration, rather than running on goodwill alone.
Adjusting to a different academic culture turned out to be its own category of challenge, separate from language. Padua staff pointed to how heavily Italian assessment relies on a single final exam. A student used to continuous assessment, regular assignments, seminar participation counting toward the grade, suddenly has everything riding on one day. Tutors described strong students failing that one exam purely from unfamiliarity with the format, not from not knowing the material. In Suceava, staff saw the same pressure from a different angle: students who understood the material well but avoided speaking up in seminars for fear of a language mistake, and were read as weaker than they actually were as a result.
Istanbul staff added a layer that’s easy to miss: classroom culture itself varies. Active debate that’s encouraged in one academic system can read as interrupting or showing off in another, and silence that signals “I’m listening” in Ukrainian classrooms can be read by a lecturer as not understanding the material. Meanwhile, Padua’s three sessions converged, independently, on a specific structural problem: students who arrive mid-semester, mainly to sit exams while studying online from Ukraine, miss the informal window when groups form and the unwritten rules of a course become clear. The recommendation that came out of all three sessions was the same: support has to start before arrival, not after.
Zagreb raised a related paradox that’s easy to overlook: inclusion mechanisms are built for a semester or a year, but a meaningful share of students stay only a few months. Orientation happens, a curator gets assigned, a city tour gets organised, and the student is gone before any of it produces a visible result. The proposed fix is practical rather than dramatic: actively help students extend their stay wherever that’s legally and academically possible, rather than treating length of stay as fixed.
Where cultural exchange worked, it worked because it stopped being about culture directly and became about a shared task instead. Istanbul described a student cooking club where local and international students prepared dishes from different countries together, and the cooking gave people something to talk about besides the war. Zagreb pointed to mixed sports teams as a similar format: language and background become secondary once there’s a match to win. Kyiv staff noted something unexpected: international students who stayed in Ukraine through the full-scale invasion often ended up with a deeper cultural connection to the country than exchange students normally build, because they’d lived through something hard alongside their Ukrainian classmates rather than observing it from outside.
Across all seven sessions, the same three conditions kept coming up for support that actually holds together: a defined role and workload, basic training in recognising distress and knowing where to send a student, and formal recognition from the university that this work counts. A system built on one person’s goodwill is not a system. It’s a stopgap that happens to be working, for now.
