Cultures Interactive - Intercultural Education and Violence Prevention, NGO, Berlin

Cultures Interactive - (CI) is a registered non-profit association, NGO, in Berlin, Germany, which works mostly in regions of East-German communities (but also in Poland and the Czech Republic) serves communities, students of different types of the public school system, and social worker. CI has developed an approach of youth-cultural social work which proved effective in preventing violence, political extre­mism/especially right-wing-extremism and religious fundamentalism among ado­lescents of disadvantaged backgrounds.

The CI approach combines elements of civic education and pedagogical exercises, psychologically based group-dynamics, and a peer-learning and informal-learning modus of teaching youth-cultural activities, as for instance Breakdance, Skate­boar­ding, Slam Poetry, Techno-DJ-ing and Digital Music Production as well as Comic and Graffiti Visual Design and others. Adolescents from mostly deprived back­grounds thus may gain physical/ acrobatic, aesthetic and technological competences while they at the same time learn about the anti-violence and anti-racist stance which emerged f.e. among US urban ghetto adolescents when they turned towards performing HipHop instead of gang war­fare. The participants also learn how to express themselves more freely in a group and reflect on their every-day social and peer interaction and biographical expe­riences, thus beginning to think about how to realize a life free of resentment, violence and extremism.

The CI approach is novel in the sense that it surpasses the largely informational and cognitive methods of interventions applied by most civic education and social work programs. CI focuses on cultural and emo­tional intelligence and is thus able to reach out to those adolescents which seem most resistant to any of the traditional peda­go­gical practices and are at risk of turning away from the school system and from civilized society altogether. Conversely, the CI approach also goes beyond what is generally referred to as Experimental Edu­cation or Education Adventure Outdoors in that it includes systematic skill learning, dynamic group-work, and historical educa­tion.

For example, in socially deprived East and West German communities CI works with adolescents who do not have access to any youth-cultural identification other than being 'national', 'anti-foreigner', 'anti-leftist' etc. or being 'ethnic' respectively, then easi­ly turning into organized neo-Nazism or fundamentalism. Delivering first-hand expe­rience and training in urban youth-cultural practices establishes the working rela­tion­ship on the basis of which questions of personal mind-set and civil life may effectively be brought up.

CI works in different settings: It offers one or two day workshops in schools and youth centres of disadvantaged rural, small town or inner-city areas offering youth-cultural and civic education courses. In the post-event follow-up phase CI consults and supports the community in building up net­works between adolescents and com­mu­nity representatives. There CI works with teachers and community profes­sio­nals as police, public administration, clubs/ asso­cia­tions, the local press/ media, instructing and training them about the - often disregarded and underrated - phe­no­mena of right-wing-extremism, funda­men­talism and adolescent violence and how to deal with it. Fur­thermore, CI has started a program of vo­ca­tional training which qualifies dis­advan­ta­ged adolescents as youth-cultural trainers.

CI also engages in projects of empirical re­search on methods of pedagogical inter­vention, youth-cultures, and media inter­action (see the rubric "Forschung"/ re­search and the EU research projects). The scientific and methodological frame­work of this research consists of qualita­tive me­thods of social and media-in­teraction re­search, psycho-therapy re­search and trauma studies, and narra­to­logy. The target is to develop criteria and pedagogical tools of social work which work well with risk populations among European adolescents and evaluate me­thods of intervention.

CI receives funding from sources of local, federal and European sources -- Ministry of Family and Youth Affairs, Ministry of Work and Social Affairs, the Federal and State Offices of Civic Education, EU Social Funds, EU Research Support, and private sponsoring.