Our Project Year with CultSense – Sensitizing Young Travellers for Local Cultures
Travel can be a perfect opportunity for cultural education and can at best increase understanding between travellers and the local population at a destination. The goal of the Erasmus+ project CultSense is to address issues of increased mobility pressures and even conflicts between locals at a tourism destination and travellers. The partnership is composed of the following organisations: Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands (lead part), University of Girona, Spain; Novia University of Applied Sciences, Finland; Instituto Politécnico de Viana do Castelo, Portugal; Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania. The associated partners WYSE Travel Confederation and the Association for Tourism and Leisure Education (ATLAS) will provide important channels to disseminate the results of the project. Below follows a short account of three students’ experiences working within the project.
We are three Bachelor’s students of Business Administration at Novia University of Applied Sciences, who participated in several tourism courses during the academic year 2020-2021. Thanks to Novia’s involvement in CultSense, most of the tourism courses were in one way or the other connected to the project. We got immersed into the project and the more we learnt and experienced, the more we became interested in the topic. The project was launched in September 2020 and we plunged into a first activity of participating in a competition among the students at the partner universities and designed a suggestion for a logo for the project. At that time, we had little understanding and it was unclear to us what the purpose of the project was but as the semester progressed, our understanding and interest grew.
The most exciting CultSense project for us was probably creating a video set in the Finnish archipelago. The archipelago for all three of us is a place where we grew up and where we nowadays spend part of our free time. In the film project we worked together with two German exchange students and showing them a family summer cottage, our best fishing spots and the secrets of Finnish sauna-bathing made us realize that what is everyday life to us can be a unique tourism experience for a nature-loving traveller. Planning, filming and editing the video in co-creation brought us closer to one another. Not only did we get to know new, awesome people, but we also learnt about cultural differences as well as how cultures can be brought together in a practical way through project work. The project has challenged us to take a deeper look into not only other cultures but also our own. There was a continuous discussion in the tourism courses about cultures and how to develop our awareness and understanding.
We were also invited to participate in an online presentation about Finland for tourism students at Instituto Politécnico de Viana do Castelo in Portugal. We showed them our video and told them more in-depth about the Finnish sauna, right to access public or privately owned land as well as sports fishing in the archipelago. The Portuguese students showed an interest in hearing our stories. What we thought would be, yet another ‘school presentation’, came alive in the session and we felt proud of who we are and what we represent. CultSense has taught us valuable lessons on how important cultural awareness is in order to understand and appreciate differences and similarities around the world.
One thing is certain, working with CultSense has changed our perception of culture and once the pandemic is over, we will be travelling with this in our mind. We will pay more attention to details in local cultures and be more aware of possible impacts of our actions. We will remember that our travel destination is the home of local people.
Jonas Lehtinen, Wilperi Jalonen, Fredrik Ulfstedt
