Neighbourness is a concept of living and learning together. This includes the essential human virtues, such as being friendly, empathetic, helpful, compassionate and respectful. In EU, due to freedom of movement and exchange programs, university classes are increasingly diverse. Dialogue challenges exist, due to cultural and national differences. Hence, effective collaboration and learning becomes a challenge. Neighborness is rarely either observed by the students or facilitated, by teachers, as a means of developing a conducive learning environment. Therefore, neighbourness is silent in any university classroom from the sciences to the arts fields. If this important element of us as beings is rarely mentioned and practiced at university level, then we are bound to have problems in families, communities and nations. This is because university graduates go on to become leaders in societies, industries and of nations, and yet many of them are deprived of this basic lesson of neighbourness and related dialogue skills. In WeLearn, we focus on diversity and seek to promote skills such as intercultural communication in both face-to-face and online environment. This dialogue is essential to build neighbourness in a diverse environment. We seek to promote neighbourness in diverse university communities. The notion of diversity in WeLearn incorporates gender, race, creed, and the other components associated within this contemporary social concern. Students, educators, facilitators and career advisors are key stakeholders as they define the learning environment and process. Our goal is to promote dialogue to foster neighbourness by developing a dialogue skills training tool kit and training different stakeholders. The urgency and need for this topic is reinforced by the increasingly diverse student population in Europe. Globalization also increases diversity of students from different parts of the world studying in Europe. There is a need to foster dialogue skills among university graduates who are an influential body of the society and nation as a whole. Thus, we develop tools to help teachers promote neighbouness through dialogue techniques. These techniques are also taught to students WeLearn objectives are based on Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership's call for innovative practices that promote cooperation, peer learning and exchanges at European level. WeLearn's three main objectives; 1) Promoting dialogue within a diverse university learning environment. 2) Supporting the use of social technologies and methods e.g. storytelling 3) Producing knowledge on aspects of pedagogical approaches and personality to promote an atmosphere of neighbourness WeLearn consortium consists of; 1. Tampere University (TAU), the coordinating partner who has academic and research experience on the topic and has digital interaction research experience for online component of the project. 2. Film University Babelsberg (FBKW) focuses on cine-arts in the broadest sense, its teaching and research staff have broad experience in the development, creation and technically advanced production of 360° film, VR experiences and other interactive media, as well as audio dramas, classical and popular music, sound installations etc. 3. Catholic University of Sacred Heart, Milan (UCSC) - members from international business background and have expertise on the topic of diversity. UCSC has international experience in the promotion of civic and social competences for its students, offering an ideal context to research and experiment neighbourness and intercultural dialogue. 4. Aalborg University (AAU) has an expertise in problem based learning approaches and experiences in the field of collaborative learning theories and group learning processes and how they contribute to integration. 5. Suleyman Demirel University (SDU) education studies background required for the pedagogical aspects of the project. 6. Riga Technical University (RTU) have mobile application development experience in project setting which is an integral part of the project. They also have sociology background ideal in WeLearn. WeLearn project starts by assessing the current situation on the topic at the partner universities. Partner universities use different pedagogies, such as, problem based learning and case based learning, thus offering opportunities to scrutinize neighbourness in learning in different context. In addition, the partner university subjects e.g. management, social sciences, education, software engineering are used in piloting of the project deliverables. Then dialogue training kits are developed for face-to-face and online environment. Piloting and cases using the training tools kits will be done and short movies and documentaries are produced from the experience. These multimedia materials will be used to develop mobile app to teach, test and promote neighbourness.
The objectives of the project focused on the enhancement of intercultural communication and neighbourness skills in a higher education context. By implementing the project, we wanted to provide teachers better access to information and know-how on how they can make the best out of multicultural leaning environments. Thus, we aspired but also succeeded in creating an online library for teachers, which they can then use to enhance their own intercultural communication and neighbourness skills and then utilize these skills in their classrooms. We wanted to support teachers also by creating offline and online toolkits, which they can use in their classrooms and thus enhance the neighbourness skills of their students. By supporting the teachers, we can also improve the learning environments and inclusivity of students in multicultural higher education classrooms, enhance social inclusion and promote the internalization in the higher education in general but in the project participant universities in particular.
The Erasmus+ project WeLearn, Intercultural Communication and Neighbourness Learning, aspired to provide insights and tools to help higher education institutions and their teachers to facilitate intercultural communication and neighbourness skills in their classrooms. While classrooms are becoming multicultural owing to trends such as globalization and growth of internet connectivity, it was found important to help teachers in their efforts to build inclusive study environments and facilitate dialogue among people from myriad of different backgrounds. This does not happen on its own, both the awareness of both teachers and students needs to be improved. Thus, WeLearn aimed to teach, develop, and promote communication skills, intercultural skills and neighbourness skills of teachers and students trough development of offline and online toolkits, which teachers can used to facilitate intercultural communication and neighbourness learning in their classrooms. These toolkits are available in the project website (http://welearn-project.eu/), but also in an application developed during the project named WeLearn, which is available in the Google Play Store.