Guerrilla Literacy Learners Erasmus Project

Project Title

Guerrilla Literacy Learners

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships addressing more than one field

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

This project develops a “Guerrilla” Flipped Class, on the model of “guerrilla gardening/knitting movement” intending to improve public spaces through citizens’ creative contribution. The target audiences are individual learners, teachers, community-builders, librarians, and teacher training departments seeking learner-centered ways to improve basic literacy thus decreasing the number of early school leavers. The end products are a teachers manual for this new approach – including an analysis of students’ needs and the monitoring of individual language acquisition processes – and learners’ tutorials, in which learners link their error patterns (the “guerilla”) to the correct ways of language use. Based on connectivist pedagogical approaches, this remedial work is linked to both formal and informal learning environments (from libraries to community schools to digital spaces) and to multilingual acquisition.

Basic literacy levels are problematic throughout Europe in the twenty-first century, resulting in an ever increasing group of citizens that drop out of school prematurely and risk becoming marginalised, unemployed and impoverished. However, it is our working hypothesis that these drop-outs can teach us new ways of acquiring literacy.

This new approach is based on a pilot project at the Catholic University College Limburg (CLUC) that explored how students can become proficient writers through creating video clips in which they show which guerilla tactics they use (make mistakes) and how they remediate them. In these tutorials, students discussed the guerilla patterns which emerged through thinking aloud exercises. At CLUC, we have termed this process guerrilla literacy, since the students guessed, mixed rules unorthodoxically, applied rules in the wrong contexts, and applied mathematical logics to solve linguistic challenges. We observed that once students could link their errors to a guerrilla pattern, it was easier for them to correct the mistake.

In the proposed project, we will develop a guerrilla methodology through: testing, mind-mapping, digital thinking aloud exercises, describing emerging guerrilla patterns, creating knowledge clips and sharing them in a MOOC. Next, we ask students to link their error patterns to structures in other languages. The rationale behind this is that most people do not speak standard languages. They speak regional alternatives or another (European) language or an idiolectal L2. Again it is our working hypothesis that if we allow learners to compare two or more linguistic systems and focus on the differences, their basic literacies will improve.

Furthermore, in our CLUC pilot project we realized we had to “unlock” learners with literacy difficulties through narratives. In these narratives they could make sense of and find recognition for the feelings of shame about their inability to learn their mother-tongue and for the pain they have suffered due to a chain of negative feedback over the years. In our proposed method these narratives of shame and pain are replaced by stories of pride, resilience and out-of-the box thinking. As such we use narratives to help create a positive identity.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 224707,61 Eur

Project Coordinator

UC LIMBURG & Country: BE

Project Partners

• Storybag
• NETRA Kereskedelmi es Tanácsadó Betéti Társaság
• 36,6 Competence Centre
• COLEGIUL ECONOMIC ION GHICA
• UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DELLA TUSCIA
• MTÜ Kating Noored
• The Gilfillan Partnership Ltd