STORYLINE aims to empower young people, to innovate youth work in the field of storytelling and language learning/ teaching and to foster social inclusion and cohesion through an intercultural, inclusive and intergenerational approach. While originally storytelling emerged as a form of passing on cultural heritage and other teachings, this project uses this concept as a bridge between the youth and the elder. The project facilitates the dialogue between locals and expats, the young and the elder communities, in order to raise awareness on the importance of community’s cooperation for the achievement of social prosperity. Each country will host 1 training of youth workers. After the youth workers’ return to their countries, they will organize a local workshop for youth on storytelling (1 to 3 days; online or offline). The 20 youth together with the experts will interview the elders and people with fewer opportunities, who went through hardship, from their community, about their stories (about their life, their city, interesting facts from their past, their cultural heritage etc.). The stories (63 in total) will be selected, edited and adapted to different levels of reading material for young learners (beginner, intermediate and advanced). The youth will also be involved in the editing and translating process of adapting the stories (via online workshops). The adapted stories will be collected by HEI and PHOART and will be organized in the StorytellingHUB – a platform for language learning, and an eBook (Title: Stories for Young Learners: A Methodology). The eBook will also comprise good practices in language learning as developed during the youth workers’ trainings. Therefore, the youth are encouraged to get to know better the elder and disadvantaged communities of their cities and to give visibility to their past by turning their stories into language learning material for other European youngsters. The project’s main aim is to encourage intercultural and intergenerational and intercultural connections and promotion of cultural heritage and exchanges through storytelling and language learning. Moreover, out of the 63 stories available on the HUB, 12 of them will be transformed into Virtual reality “escape rooms” (IO2). This game will be called “EscapeStory Sphere” and will be an interactive language-learning game which promotes cultural heritage and storytelling as a way to learn about a language and a culture. The game will be available free, online, and can be used with VR glasses or without, by using a laptop, phone or tablet.
Aim: To foster a cohesive and inclusive society through storytelling, digitalization and through an intergenerational and intercultural approach among youth. Specific Objectives: 1. To provide quality youth work and innovative tools and practices in storytelling, language-learning, ICT and non-formal education at European level. 2. To foster social inclusion among youth from Spain, Portugal and Romania by an increase in the number of youth learning each other’s language and by having more people encouraged to share culture and heritage through storytelling and ICT.
We applied for this specific project as we identified a series of needs regarding youth, youth workers and the communities of the partner organizations. These needs refer to the fact that youth aged 16-29 needed to be exposed to real stories of elders and people that went through hardship, as available life lessons; to improve their employability potential by gaining new skills related to writing, language, ICT and cultural heritage; to create a bridge between youth, elders and people with fewer opportunities and to create a united and inclusive society (which was highly needed especially since the pandemic started); to make intercultural and european cooperation more accessible through the promotion of language learning; to promote authentic cultural heritage through storytelling (for e.g. people who experienced World War Two and have worth discovering stories). We identified further needs that referred to the lack of content and learning material on these topics, that is free, youth-friendly (created by youth for youth), interactive, innovative and which contains social inclusion aspects as well. Moreover most youth workers in these fields needed more networking opportunities for the development of their work.