This webinar will explore the approaches to reading and education that allow adults and children to learn and grow together: they develop the literacy strengths of the family and indeed of the whole community.

Date: 25 October 2022    

Time: 17:30 – 19:45 CET (Dublin, London 16:30 – 18:45; Athens, Helsinki 18:30 – 20:45)

Participation Fee: Free of charge

WEBINAR REGISTRATION

YOU WILL RECEIVE THE ZOOM LINK TWO DAYS BEFORE THE EVENT.

FELA organises a series of professional thematic online webinars to share the insights and experiences of the FELA community with the FELA community and beyond. The webinars involve the sharing of original research, innovative practices and original insights into how e-learning and teaching have been carried out in a variety of professional contexts, ranging across primary, secondary, tertiary, regional and national communities and in literacy associations themselves.

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Programme

17:30 Máirín Wilson, Chair of the Federation of European Literacy Associations

17:35 Ann Devitt, Family Literacy Online:  Case studies of good practice in Ireland during Covid.  

Ann’s presentation will focus on an Irish Research Council-funded COALESCE Family Digital Literacy project in collaboration with NALA (the National Adult Literacy Agency) in Ireland.  She will talk about case studies of family learning programmes that made the transition to online during Covid, the outcomes for parents involved and the critical factors for success. 

18:05 Loreto Núñez, Stories That Create Bonds (and Readers)

The Swiss Institute for Children’s and Youth Media coordinates the family literacy program “Schenk mir eine Geschichte” (“Tell me a story”) in the German-speaking part of Switzerland / “1001 histoires dans les langues du monde” (“1001 stories in the languages of the world”) in the French-speaking region. The program provides storytelling sessions to families with migrant backgrounds with small children in the native language of the families. The main goal is to promote the language and literacy development of the children and to increase parental involvement in the children’s early education. 

18:35 Tilka Jamnik, The Intergenerational Reading of Young Adult Books

Tilka will talk about a project which was developed by the Slovenian Reading Badge Society in collaboration with the Slovenian Book Agency in 2014/2015. The project brought together young people and adult readers. The shared reading of children’s and young adult books have fostered intergenerational relationships and created more (and better) readers – even during the COVID-19 pandemic.

19:05 Juli-Anna Aerila, StoRe-approach to family reading

In her presentation, Juli-Anna will concentrate on the innovation of StoRe-approach to family reading. StoRe-approach (Stories make Readers) is a research-based approach to literature and literacy education for early childhood and primary education. It concentrates on arts-based activities and a communal view to reading. The pedagogical tools for StoRe involve teachers as active innovators; they are mostly developed following the steps of action research. The one presented in this talk is a form of cloakroom library which has been developed in Finland since 2017.

19:35    Q & A, wrap-up    

 

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Presenters

Ann Devitt is an Associate Professor of Language Education at the School of Education, Trinity College Dublin and Academic Director for Learnovate, the Enterprise Ireland-funded centre of excellence for educational technology based in Trinity.

Loreto Núñez has been Director of the Lausanne office of the Swiss Institute for Children’s and Youth Media for the French-speaking part of Switzerland since 2019. Before, Loreto was deputy assistant professor and assistant in comparative literature at the University of Lausanne. 

Tilka Jamnik, a retired Head of The Centre for Youth Literature and Librarianship, the recipient of the 2019 ILA Maryann Manning Special Service Award, and collaborator of the IBBY Slovenia and of the Reading Badge. An agile reading promoter and activist, she coordinates the Intergenerational Reading project (running for the ninth season this year).

Juli-Anna Aerila is an Adjunct Professor (literature education and reading) and Senior Lecturer of the Didactics of Mother Tongue and Literature, at the University of Turku, Finland. Together with Merja Kauppinen (from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland), they have been working with StoRe-approach since 2017. They have published two books, and several scientific and professional articles, and have led many in-service and research projects on StoRe.