CLE
Community Learning Ecosystem (CLE)
CLE refers to a dynamic and relational system composed of diverse actors, spaces, practices, and structures that interact within a community context to enable learning processes.
CLE as a Community Living Lab
CLE is currently being explored as a living lab. An evolving space where the relationships between different elements of the learning ecosystem are not predefined, but discovered through practice.
The aim is to better understand how these elements can interact in ways that support meaningful participation, evolving roles, and sustained engagement over time.
Learning is not something delivered, but something that emerges through participation, relationships, and shared context.
Project
Cultural Exchange
Cultural Exchange is a community-led initiative developed in Galway to bring people from different cultural backgrounds together through storytelling, food, music, creativity, and shared lived experience.
Each session is led and co-created by a volunteer who shares the beauty and meaning of their culture through their own perspective, moving beyond what is often shown in media and news.
Through informal dialogue, creative activities, and shared cultural practices, Cultural Exchange supports deeper connections between people who may not otherwise meet. It helps participants recognise common experiences while also valuing difference, memory, identity, and place.
At its heart, Cultural Exchange uses culture as a bridge to build empathy, intercultural understanding, friendship, and a stronger shared sense of home in Galway.
What we are exploring
Current learning
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Belonging
Condition for meaningful engagement
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Agency
How people move beyond participation to shape the shared space
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Relatedness
Connecting learning to lived experience
Project
Cultural Exchange for Climate Stories
In response to Galway City Council’s invitation to participate in Galway Climate Festival 2026, the Cultural Exchange programme has been adapted to engage with climate change through culturally grounded storytelling and creative expression.
Cultural Exchange for Climate Stories brings people from different cultural backgrounds together to explore how climate change is experienced, remembered, and understood across different countries and cultures. Rather than presenting climate change only through facts or abstract information, the project creates space for personal stories connected to land, water, food, seasons, storms, migration, resilience, and hope.
Through creative workshops with local artists, participants co-create country-based stands that share climate stories through visual design, cultural objects, images, written reflections, and traditional snacks. Each stand invites visitors to encounter climate change through lived experience, cultural knowledge, and personal memory.
By connecting climate action with culture and community participation, Cultural Exchange for Climate Stories helps make climate conversations more human, inclusive, and meaningful. It shows how storytelling and creativity can build empathy, deepen understanding, and bring people together around a shared responsibility for the future.
Contact Porooshat Sabeti
Initiator of CLE
Email: porooshat.sabeti@universityofgalway.ie
Phone: +353858405397