School libraries promoting readers, values, literacies, skills and inclusion. Erasmus Project

Project Title

School libraries promoting readers, values, literacies, skills and inclusion.

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 : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; Quality Improvement Institutions and/or methods (incl. school development)

Project Summary

The number of readers has been decreasing dramatically in the last decade in schools. The numbers of reading records in school libraries show a reduction of about 25 per cent compared to 2000, mainly due to competition from the digital universe. These data are worrisome, showing the urgency to restore reading to the education agenda, “to respond to the diversity of the needs of all students, raise cultural standards and facilitate the development of values and skills essential to the exercise of citizenship” (Pisa 2018). It is to increase the number of readers, to reinforce the action of libraries in the promotion of the habits and the taste for reading and the support of associated literacies, restoring the importance of reading books in schools, that five countries have joined, in the commitment of, through this demanding project with the support of the respective school libraries, guarantee, at the end of the project, a 50% growth in the number of readers in these schools.
Explicit and intentional integration into the project of activities carried out with and by school libraries, in the areas of reading media skills, in different readings supports, is one of the most important strategies for the inclusion of all students and guarantees their full citizenship in the knowledge and information society of the 21st century. Portugal, Norway, Italy, Greece and Poland form a partnership to foster the cultural and transforming power of the book and libraries in their schools, and the development of associated literacies, trying to promote the reading skill as access for all knowledge and therefore as a key factor for inclusion and exercise of full citizenship. Four librarian teachers and four teachers of a school library (IT) and about 25 teachers are directly involved in this project – Erasmus Time. This project will directly cover 2000 students aged between 12 and 15 years old, and all users served by school libraries, students, teachers, families and community.
Using the teams and partnerships constituted, diversified reading activities (with books and ebooks) and artistic-literary experimentation will be developed, including dramatizing, acting, recite recount, hearing and production of various types of texts for the development of reading and literacies, with the creation of e-books with digital tools.
The main methodologies will be the following in all schools: the coordinator and his school library provide a multidisciplinary team composed of teachers that will activate a reading program for all school students; the support to the literary and digital activities developed in multiple stands, reading literary works of partner countries to spread their culture, establishing comparisons, bridges and affinities, spreading this cultural diversity, promoting reading activities that potentiate inclusion and multiculturalism and the defence of human rights. The activities to be developed will be as follows: “Reading all together” (facilitating the inclusion of students from other countries or in situations of risk, exclusion, failure or marginalization), “Stop Reading” (the whole school reads simultaneously), “10 minutes to Read” (daily reading in the classroom), “Family reading” and “Reading competition”, creation of videobooks, podcasts, audiobooks, using tablets and digital applications. Books – from national and European literature – associated with the Holocaust, will be central to this project, evoking its victims’ events, or those who were courageous and tolerant (like Aristides de Sousa Mendes).
This project will also support the foundation of a library at the partner school in Greece.
The short-term staff training events will focus on school Libraries, to pass on the expertise of each school to teachers of partner schools. In this project, teachers will have the opportunity to share best practices in their libraries and classes, to get objective feedback on activities developed, and to implement best practice examples in their teaching or the libraries. This project brings added future value to partner libraries and schools.
Through the involvement of the project’s teaching teams (library and full-time teachers) and of the plan of activities to be developed, with initiatives covering the whole school, as previously reported, the intention is to contribute to an education that promotes literacy practices and skills for all, ensuring that education is an effective right for ALL students and not the privilege of some.
The project will increase the quality of the educational process, through the sharing of practices and experiences, collaborative activities, among participants from other EU education systems.
We want to promote the idea of our common identity, using European literature heritage as the basic topic of our activities, developing the European dimension of education through reading and European culture, to develop a European identity based on a set of values and the belonging to Europe.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 162538 Eur

Project Coordinator

Escola Básica e Secundária de Canelas & Country: PT

Project Partners

• Kleiverud skole
• 2nd Highschool of Agios Nikolaos
• XIII Liceum Ogólnokształcące z Oddziałami Dwujęzycznymi im. płk. Leopolda Lisa – Kuli w Warszawie
• Istituto Comprensivo Di Vittorio-Padre Pio