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Europe is the theatre for a growing number of intercommunity conflicts. In recent years these have included not only “historical conflicts” – such as those in N. Ireland, Cyprus, the Balkans, and the Basque Country – but also new conflicts related to poor integration of immigrant population and new immigration from the developing countries. In this situation a steadily growing number of professionals – local administrators, policemen, teachers etc. – come into contact with inter-community conflict in their daily work. In many cases they lack the skills to perform their work effectively.
The last twenty years have seen the development of best practices for teaching and developing such skills. However, very few of the potential beneficiaries have access to this kind of training. The main reason is that nearly all current training is provided in the classroom – at a high cost, particularly for the organizations (usually NGOs) providing the training. In this setting, the goal of EUTOPIA-MT is to use technology to make mediation training available to far larger populations than is currently possible. To this end, the project will bring together two existing products: (i) an innovative methodology for the teaching of mediation skills, based on role-playing in the classroom; (ii) a Web-based simulation tool (EUTOPIA) allowing teachers to provide use the same techniques with online learners. The project will test the effectiveness of this solution in three situations of intercommunity conflict, respectively in Cyprus, Northern Ireland and Southern Italy (where the conflict involves friction between native and immigrant communities). In all three keys teachers, from NGOs already providing mediation training to local communities will test the effectiveness of the technology solution in bringing their services to a broader target population.
The Partnership will be coordinated by the Dipartimento di Scienze Relazionali of Università di Napoli, which has been responsible for developing EUTOPIA. The teaching methodology will come from Coop. Passaggi , which has developed its teaching practices over many years. The trials will be run by Coop. Passaggi (which will test the new teaching method in Naples area), ICR (which will perform the same work in Northern Ireland) and INDEX (for Cyprus).
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