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 take part in the Climate Inspiration Festival 2026, the Cultural Exchange programme was adapted to engage with climate change through culturally grounded storytelling and creative expression. The project was funded by Galway City Council through the Creative Communities Fund, an initiative of the Creative Ireland Programme.
Cultural Exchange for Climate Stories brought people from different cultural backgrounds together to explore how climate change is experienced, remembered, and understood across different countries and cultures. One question shaped every stand: How has climate change touched my own life, my culture, and the places that have shaped who I am?
Rather than presenting climate change only through facts or abstract information, the project created space for personal stories connected to land, water, food, seasons, storms, migration, resilience, and hope.
Across three creative workshops with local artists, volunteers from five countries co-created country stands. The materials were mostly recycled. The stands shared climate stories through visual design, cultural objects, images, written reflections, and traditional snacks as an entry point for conversation with participants.
The exhibition was first presented at:
- Climate Inspiration Festival 2026
- Westside Arts Festival
- Westside Public Library for three weeks
By connecting climate action with culture and community participation, Cultural Exchange for Climate Stories made climate conversations more human, inclusive, and meaningful. It showed how storytelling and creativity can build empathy, deepen understanding, and bring people together around a scientific topic and a shared responsibility for the future.
If you would like to know more about the project, you can read Where Stories Meet. The booklet tells the story of how the project came about, seen through the eyes of its designer, and then hands over to the volunteers and artists to describe it in their own words.
Contact Porooshat Sabeti
Initiator of CLE
Email: porooshat.sabeti@universityofgalway.ie
Phone: +353858405397