Erasmus Book Club

The majority of our students don´t read for pleasure. We had found out that this is a common problem in all the European countries. At the same time as young people read less they seem to be less able and interested in studying, have difficulties in concentrating and smaller vocabularies but also experience more stress. We believed that given the opportunity to study literature in different ways in different environments and together with their European peers they would find the positive effects reading has and by making the activities visible in our schools these effects could be found by larger groups of students in each partner school.

Our aim was to make our students read more and understand the benefits they gain by reading. Reading gives an opportunity to expand one´s horizons and provides escape, but can also open doors. It also provides information, both academic and for keeping up with the interests. Our main objective was to motivate our students in their literature and language studies and make them interested in the bigger picture of literature all over Europe. We wanted them to be aware of the diversity of literature that we have in Europe, both fiction and non-fiction. With our project we wanted to raise literature and literacy awareness both among our students and also among the teachers and the principals. We also wanted to give our teachers opportunities to cooperate with their European colleagues and empower them to develop their teaching skills and course contents and materials. On the other hand we wanted to give both our teachers, students and librarians a chance to practice their foreign language skills, intercultural communication and project management skills. The concrete objective of our project was to have a student-designed literature course.

We have had online staff meetings to discuss project management. Students have had online meetings to plan and share their activities and the course plan they worked on. We have had two transnational meetings for teachers to work on their part of the project, to plan the cooperation and to plan and implement the dissemination of our project, final report and future cooperation. Our project has had four Learning, Teaching and Training Activities to give our students better possibilities to work on their course plan and cooperation in foreign languages, but also to get to know the partner schools and local culture. All these LTT´s included blended parts where project students not travelling could take part in online events.

Our students, teachers and librarians have learned about literature in partner countries and gain new perspectives to their own. They have become more fluent in foreign languages, and more confident in intercultural communication and cooperation. They have learned about project work, especially Erasmus+ and online tools. We now have a new literature course planned by our students. The course includes methods and material our students appreciate and it has a European aspect as the sample texts will be from the partner countries. When the students have been in charge, they have learned to take responsibility and share tasks. The course will help to interest future students both within our schools and our partnership but also elsewhere as the material is available on our public blog. Both the students, the teachers, the librarians and our schools have a wider international network for future cooperation.