ActiveLibrary; means “living stories of/for everyone; art in language learning; active literacy learning”

Our project is binding together culture, literature and language learning in pedagogical context. We are promoting teachers to build up virtual libraries with their pupils. The libraries deal with different themes, e.g. scifi, environmental protection, the Norse. They consist of texts and authentic books considering the theme. There are activities, learning programmes, text banks, internet links, outcomes of projects, photos and videos in the virtual libraries.

There are several aims of the ActLib-project concerning literacy learning, multicultural pedagogy and teacher training:

• develop literacy competencies in multicultural and multilingual learning environments
• activate children and teens to take part of the production of learning material of their own
• develop collaborative learning methods
• motivate pupil to practice reading and writing literacy with art education methods
• enrich pupils’ imagination with acting with different stories
• connect the separate school subjects together to promote multidimensional language education in school
• carry out in-service teacher training in relation to language education and literature teaching.

Libraries will be made in two phases in the semester 2013–14 and 2014–15 by Finnish teachers and classes. In the first phase about 12 multicultural and plurilingual mother language teachers in Jyväskylä will develop authentic language learning material based on fairy tales, stories and literature from their own culture. The material will be made by e.g. Arabic, Turkish, Russian, Swahili, Hungarian, Dutch and Siamese learning groups.

In the second phase primary school teachers / mother tongue teachers (Finnish) with their L2-learners will take part to the project creating libraries of their own. They will collect texts and books and develop exercises from specific themes like scifi, recycling, authors (Tove Jansson and the Moomins). The main aim of the first semester is to create on internet data base libraries and share experiences about this way of act in language/literacy learning. We have also some teacher students who will make their thesis for bachelor's or master’s degree from ActLib learning.

The ActLib project is funded by the Finnish foundation Koneen Säätiö. The project is based on a passed European Union funded project EuroLib (The European Children’s Travelling Language Library, http://www.eulib.eu/home.html). EuroLib was taken part by six European countries. Like that we would also like to collaborate with other countries, universities, schools and teachers. Please, contact us!