The DIALLS Platform: Supporting Cultural Literacy and Understanding of European Values Over the Internet

Abstract

AbstractIn this chapter we present the process of designing and developing a novel online platform for supporting cultural literacy learning, involving the elaboration and understanding of European values in collaborative dialogue between students, with teacher-led reflection on wordless texts. Wordless texts are books or videos that comprise sequences of pictures which stimulate student readers to reconstruct the attendant narratives (see Chapters 10.1007/978-3-030-71778-0_5 and 10.1007/978-3-030-71778-0_6, this volume). The narratives in question, available publicly, are designed to stimulate discussions relating to European values, notably tolerance, empathy and inclusion (Lähdesmäki et al. in Intercultural dialogue in European education policies: A conceptual approach. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2020). The main questions for platform design were therefore how to facilitate productive discussions involving European values, on or around such wordless texts, and to structure such discussions in a way that is closely anchored in the texts.