In June 2025, CEU's Yehuda Elkana Center successfully concluded the three-year Erasmus+ BELONG project. As the full name suggests, Better Education through Long-term Investment into Inclusiveness and Student and Staff Wellbeing was an innovative attempt, in collaboration with other universities, to tackle enduring challenges whose importance have been more widely recognized in the post-COVID environment. The project addressed such questions as the following:
- What is the connection between the sense of belonging to a teaching and learning community and the mental health of faculty and students?
- What can universities do to improve the mental health of its teachers and students?
- Does trust and the feeling of being included in university matters – particularly in conversations about teaching, learning and research – contribute to a stronger sense of belonging?
In an international consortium of five universities - Comenius University Bratislava, Masaryk University Brno, Central European University, Nottingham Trent University and University of Madeira – CEU was represented in the BELONG project by the Yehuda Elkana Center as well as colleagues from the Office of Inclusion, Diversity and Equality, and the Career Services Office.
Besides contributing to all project outcomes - such as a survey on student and staff well-being and sense of belonging, a situational map of the current state and an action plan to enhance student and staff well-being and inclusiveness at project partner institutions - the Elkana Center had a leading role in designing a course for faculty members on inclusive teaching and creating an online repository on inclusive teaching and learning.
The open access repository offers a collection of useful resources for faculty who wish to make their teaching more inclusive. The portal has two main sections. The first one includes resources from the course on inclusive teaching developed within the BELONG project - all the materials developed and used by facilitators of the course, along with examples of reflections on inclusive teaching and learning practices by participants of the course.
The thematic areas section consists of links to resources that have been categorized according to key themes in inclusive teaching and learning:
- From accommodations to inclusivity: diversity, universal design for learning
- Inclusive design
- Inclusive classroom practices
- Inclusive assessment
The BELONG team at CEU Vienna