Over the past six years, the Mirai Tsukuri Daigaku (Creating the Future University) project has been being implemented in home healthcare institutions, allowing collaboration between disabled people and healthcare professionals to develop a learning environment where everyone can learn, regardless of their disability status.
For its first year, this project focused on lecture-style learning accompanied by external instructors, while in the second year, the participants engaged in team-based research activities that fostered an atmosphere of inquiry into themes that are related to life, such as their own living situations and life paths.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic led the project to transition to online activities from its third year. During this time, when people with and without disabilities were forced to consider their lives in a new light, a range of learning opportunities opened up, including book clubs, philosophy study groups, movie clubs, and sign language and Ainu language classes, providing a space where participants could learn whatever they wanted to learn.
With the use of online tools, it became for participants to join from different locations and to participate at their own pace by watching recordings, which led to the formation of a learning community that features diverse participation patterns and levels of engagement.
The relationship between disabled people and healthcare professionals became transformed into a partnership between equal learning subjects, and opportunities were created for novel encounters among people with diverse backgrounds, including other participants.
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