From September 25th to October 4th, we held the youth exchange Swipe Right for Change: Tolerance in the Digital World in the Blue Whale Educational Centre, in Tauchen, Austria. This exchange brought together 30 young people from Germany, Austria, Serbia, Italy and Romania, and it was highly interactive, bringing participants to create various workshops on the topics of digital literacy, active citizenship, and intercultural communication.

We started the week off getting to know each other, exploring the surroundings of Tauchen and the Blue Whale. Our partners at Generation Europe shared their approach to education which has formed the space to be, more or less, like a kindergarten for adults, allowing participants to explore all kinds of activities ranging from music (the house has more than 20 pianos), knitting (some people made a whole new pair of socks), drawing and painting, playing volleyball, or taking a scroll through the mountains (mushrooms were found!).

Each team worked on two different workshops from the second day onwards. We started off with a session on how to recognise fake news. Afterwards, we had the topic of freedom of speech vs hate speech, and the afternoon was filled with sessions about prejudice and stereotypes. Day three delved into how hate manifests online, and how anonymity could bring people to feel pressured into either sharing or omitting their personal views from others. The group presented a diverse and broad spectrum, but nevertheless, people strived to work together. We also explored alternative platforms by taking a closer look at how social media and other virtual spaces we use in our daily life are formed, run and managed, and then thinking of what a sustainable and more efficient alternative would look like. And at the end of the day, we discussed how we can deal with our feelings of anger. This also helped us set up for the 3-day digital disconnection challenge that started the next morning.

Throughout the challenge, participants put away all their devices to observe how they were impacted, and how they would like to interact with the online world and social media afterwards. We started day four, familiarising ourselves with digital disconnection by creating little figures that would accompany us the rest of the week, then we used the rest of the day to hear about how hate manifests offline, and discuss how populism speaks.

Day five, halfway through this exchange, we discussed how people were feeling with the disconnection, and reflected on the global perspective of online access, with a workshop that asked whether everyone should have the right to a smartphone, what are the consequences of the digital divide but also the environmental impacts of virtual expansion, where do resources for these devices come from, versus who gets to run and use the internet, and in what ways.

On day six, our last disconnection challenge day, we discussed how to be active digital citizens. We also had a game to let us reflect on intercultural communication, its challenges and features, and a very practical workshop to present the concept of non-violent communication. We finished the day by writing letters to ourselves and reconnecting to our locked-away devices.

All the workshops created by participants followed non-formal-education methodologies, but they were themselves a learning methodology that brought young people to the role of facilitators, breaking the hierarchical concepts often present in formal education of the “teacher” as the giver of knowledge, and “students” as the recipients. Here, they were welcomed to engage with the topics by developing their own ideas and presenting them to others but also adding to each other’s perspectives through the workshops themselves. This innovative approach brought peer learning and horizontal knowledge exchange to the project as one of the main forms of learning, and it was remarkably successful, despite being new for many of the participants.

Day seven was marked by the appearance of a guest speaker, Dusty Whistles, who came to us to share her work on archival agitation and discuss how propaganda has been used throughout history and continues to be used today. We looked at very clear examples of imagery used by states to portray narratives and discussed the importance of People’s history. With this inspiration, participants then organised themselves into groups and started working on the educational platform, with the plan of it to continue beyond the project. For now, it took the shape of an Instagram page and can be found here: https://www.instagram.com/swipe4change/

We finished the project by presenting the page and creating strategies to keep it active, making plans to disseminate what we had learned, setting up the youth pass certificates, and celebrating our time together. The interactive and collaborative approach proved to be great learning tools, and the young participants have shared in follow-up meeting that they have felt the impact of the topics developed: More aware of bias in news, more willing to engage critically with media, active practice of non-violent communication, and further development and use of the methodologies used in their own work and in public events made to disseminate the project’s impact.

Some participants have recreated workshops from the projects in their local communities, schools or universities. Others continue to engage virtually with the page or create video content, which is made available to the public.

All in all, this project has proved to be a true adventure, with all the challenges and interactions it created, and all the connections it fostered. We are deeply thankful to everyone who engaged with it, our main funder Erasmus+, and share special thanks to all the group leaders and our partners:

Generation Europa – https://generationeuropa.eu/
New Wellness Education – https://www.newellnesseducation.com/
Agoje – https://www.agoje.eu/
Srednja škola ,,Svilajnac” – https://skolasvilajnac.edu.rs/