This workshop reports the preliminary results of a previous EERA-funded international and interdisciplinary workshops (ECER - Network 17 and 20) and, while doing so, further develops the concept of ‘cultural ecologies’ in view of recent discussions on cultural learning, identity and the European project. More specifically, our proposal focuses on two key concepts that are being promoted within European educational policy discourses: the ‘Engaged University’ and ‘Cultural Learning’. It sheds new light on and develops future solutions for effective knowledge exchange and ‘shared meaning making’ within and across the public, the cultural and the academic sphere by highlighting ‘situated’ inclusive practices of cultural learning.

The current influx of refugees and a widespread disillusionment of the European project calls for a critical reflection on educational practices and their efficiency ( Blyth 2013; Myers and Grosvenor 2014). Drawing on a range of work cultural learning can be seen as a "denominator of successful multimodal and participatory and inclusive strategies that individuals and collectives use" to bridge temporal and spatial gaps and discontinuities posed by increasing mobility and diversity in late modern setting (Priem& Herman, 2015; Archer 2012; Waterton 2010; McQeen-Thomson, James, & Ziguras 2004; Phinney, Horenczyk, Liebkind & Vedder 2001). The transformative power of cultural learning is claimed to “promote”self-esteem, good mental health and community solidarity as it effectively socialises people into values and dispositions that are the result of shared historical experiences, which in turn promote a sense of belonging” (Myers &Grosvenor 2014).

In recent years, ecological concepts and metaphors added new perspectives – to better understand the situatedness and complexity of the production of meaning (Du Gay et al. 1997) and related, processes of learning (e.g. Barron 2006). Recent advances in the analysis of cultural learning also reveal that it simultaneously points in two directions: “outwards” to language, rituals, discourses, ideologies, myths and all kinds of systems of signification”; and “inwards” to states of subjectivity that these practices embody (Jones 2009; Hall 1997; Du Gay et al. 1997).

At the heart of this research project therefore is a desire to gain insight in the cultural and learning ecologies, as well as to capture the double sided process of cultural learning within a particular ‘community of practice’, namely that of academics engaged in cultural learning, who are collectively located at the interface between the local state and the arrival of communities with different cultural traditions and values (Anderson, 1991; Wenger, 1999; Lave & Wenger 1991). Using the ‘inwards’/’outwards’ framework gives an ideal opportunity to analyse academics’ identity in motion – as they engage in the process of cultural learning. The project will address how academics ‘move’ within and throughout these ecologies and get into contact with varied forms of cultural heritage at different stages of their professional career and use the cultural literacy that they acquire in the process of cultural learning to make sense of and get engaged with the surrounding social environment.

Within the framework of the “Cultural Learning, Identity and the European Project” two workshops were held in Barcelona (November 2015) and Riga (March 2016) with an attempt to open up a critical dialogue about existing discourses and practices of cultural learning in six different cities. Benefitting from the fruitful collaboration of Network 17 and Network 20 contemporary issues of academic identity and civic engagement in Europe which came to the suface during the project were reconsidered from a historical perspective. As a key concern of cultural learning, the way in which the different orientations and preferences towards the future recast individual and collective histories as “participatory practices” was explored (Doctorow, 2011; Fielding & Moss 2010).

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