Conference Agenda

This paper critically examines how cultural sensitivity – understood as a key democratic competence within the Council of Europe Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC; Council of Europe, 2018) – is constructed and enacted in service-learning (SL) partnerships with rural communities. While cultural sensitivity is often framed normatively as respect for diversity, this study argues that such a perspective remains analytically insufficient and risks obscuring underlying tensions related to power, inequality, and participation (Gregorová et al., 2025).

Drawing on qualitative data from 15 focus groups involving 45 students, 30 teachers, and 31 community partners, the paper adopts a multi-actor perspective to explore how cultural sensitivity is differently understood and operationalised across these groups.

Evidence from the cases collected in five European countries (Austria, Croatia, Italy, Slovakia and Spain) reveals that cultural sensitivity is differently understood and enacted across stakeholder groups. Data were collected through interviews , and the responses informed the creation of a framework structured around People, Purpose, Places, and Partnership (Mikelic-Preradovic et al., submitted). Students primarily emphasised respect for local customs, dialects, and traditions, alongside the need to adapt communication and project activities to community contexts, whereas teachers highlighted deeper structural dimensions, including power asymmetries, historical distrust toward external actors, and the importance of reflexivity in avoiding extractive or top-down approaches. In contrast, rural community partners framed cultural sensitivity as recognition of their lived realities and knowledge, stressing the importance of avoiding stereotypes, respecting local values, and engaging communities as equal partners through co-creation and inclusive participation.

The paper contributes to ongoing debates on democratic competences in higher education by proposing a shift from normative to critical and relational conceptualisations of cultural sensitivity. Furthermore, the study offers implications for the design of service-learning curricula that better prepare students to navigate complexity, engage in meaningful dialogue, and foster more equitable university–community partnerships.

The Socio-spatial Design Agency (SSDA) is a service-learning course centred on community-engaged architectural design. Students from the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture develop spatial projects, installations, interventions, or tools that respond to socio-spatial issues raised by societal partners.

In 2025, the SSDA tutor and students began collaborating with FMDO (Federatie Mondiale en Democratische Organisaties), an NPO leveraging diversity to build bridges, counter polarization, and strengthen social participation. Through partnerships with socio-cultural associations and volunteers, FMDO creates spaces for dialogue and empowers people with a migration background.

Within this collaboration, the SSDA engages in FMDO’s Op zoek naar een deurbel project, a social-artistic initiative collecting housing stories from people with a migration background and exploring themes such as belonging, vacancy, housing quality, homelessness, and discrimination. These stories form the basis for a participative performance and a documentary.

As in most service-learning contexts, the SSDA course aims to foster students’ academic, professional, and personal (citizenship) development. Transition Design and Critical Spatial Practice serve as overarching course frameworks, while tools such as Iceberg Analysis and the Principles of Ethical and Effective Service support systemic thinking and reciprocal collaboration with community partners. Transition Design equips designers to contribute to sustainable and inclusive societal transitions, while Critical Spatial Practice is a self-reflective architectural and artistic approach that questions and seeks to transform the social conditions of the sites it engages.

Although competences for democratic culture and intercultural dialogue are part of the course, they are currently addressed only implicitly. In this reflection, the SSDA tutor and FMDO project coordinator explore how, in the Op zoek naar een deurbel project, storytelling and design intersect to produce democratic learning moments. And they formulate suggestions on how democratic education could take a more central place in the course, for example, by reformulating the content, learning goals, or evaluation framework. Students will also be involved in this reflection process; collective reflective writing will be tested as a method for making course development more participatory by involving both community partners and students in the course (re)design.

While grounded in a single course, this reflection aims to spark a wider dialogue on how the Faculty of Architecture can more explicitly integrate democratic competences into its curriculum and reconsider its definition of ‘professional excellence.’ Given that the SSDA tutor is also the faculty’s service‑learning coordinator, the outcomes of this work will serve to spark a faculty‑level debate on democratic education in architecture.

Times are changing in the least Dylanesque sense of the expression. For decades, our society has sedimented a culture of disconnection that cuts across today’s ecosocial and democratic crises, and which the university, rather than cushioning, sometimes ends up sharpening, consciously or unconsciously. Dominant university models prioritize training for the market, the fragmentation of knowledge, competition, and meritocracy, severing learning from lived experience, from territory, and from the power relations that structure inequality. Practices of university social engagement (such as volunteering, critical pedagogy, or service-learning), when designed without systemic analysis or a rights-based approach, become well-intentioned stopgaps, projects in which community collaboration may be epiphenomenal or merely adjectival, ultimately reinforcing paternalistic, individualistic, and depoliticized imaginaries (Mitchell, 2008; Mitchell and Latta, 2020). A teleological paradox is thus created, whereby well-directed effort becomes a mirroring vector that naturalizes poverty, exclusion, and unsustainability, while simultaneously limiting social impact and transformative educational potential.

Our proposal arises as a response to this scenario and is, consequently necessarily, a meta-project: a service-learning experience about service-learning itself. In collaboration with the NGO ONGawa, students from the degree on Modern Languages and Translation at the University of Alcalá will translate into English a collection of materials aimed at reconnecting the university and its surrounding community through horizontal relationships, symmetrical and dialogical initiatives, sustainable actions, and a discourse that flattens hierarchical structures and dismantles purely assistentialist frameworks.

Based on these translated resources, faculty members, students, and NGO participants will organize workshops with an initial local focus and, subsequently, an international scope, through which they will share this knowledge and these best practices to foster a genuine, deep, and transnational re-signification of the links between higher education and its environments. Our main goal is to generate a chain reaction that begins in the local community, extends to students, and from there reaches universities across Europe, ultimately returning to the community substratum.

In this sense, the project contributes to the redefinition of educational goals and curriculum design within higher education (track C). By actively involving students, faculty, and community partners in the co-creation, translation, and dissemination of knowledge, it promotes a participatory approach to syllabus development that integrates civic responsibility and democratic engagement as core components of academic training. Ultimately, the initiative seeks to position service-learning as a cross-cutting axis within degree programs, fostering a renewed understanding of training and collaboration that incorporates social commitment, symmetric interaction, and long-term community impact.