EPSULA - Educational Portal for Sustainable Cultural Diversity in Latin America

The EPSULA project addresses challenges faced by the vulnerable indigenous communities in distant regions of Ecuador and El Salvador and aims to develop an open-source innovative multilingual online portal that will form part of HE programmes, thanks to which the community individual members with fewer opportunities will be able to become active agents of change.

The portal has two essential types of content, a digital Collection of tangible (traditional crafts) and intangible (folklore, oral traditions) cultural heritage items, and a digital Compendium of educational modules and innovative methodologies.

The goals of the EPSULA project will have Higher Education level, cultural and social level impact.

The portal has been created over two years of intensive work. In the first year, colleagues from Ecuador and El Salvador visited several indigenous communities and conducted video interviews in native languages. These videos, edited and subtitled in Spanish and English, formed the foundation for the 12 EPSULA modules developed during the second year of the project, which offer an overview of the cultures, beliefs, and ways of life of the indigenous peoples of Ecuador and El Salvador. Now available in both Spanish and English, the portal is open to the public. The collection of seven indigenous languages featured in the videos and the various pedagogical methodologies used in the activities create a portal characterized by cultural diversity, with uses extending far beyond simple electronic archiving or use in university classes: activities in museums and libraries, workshops with schools of various grades, training sessions with remote and vulnerable communities are just some of the experiences already carried out with this powerful tool for cultural inclusion and awareness. 

Take a look at our portal here: https://www.epsula.eu/en/portal

Masaryk University (Czech Republic)