Get Readers on the Wavelength of Emotions

This project aims to develop teacher trainers’ and subsequently teachers’ competences to address students’ literacy and emotional learning needs. In doing this, it will develop a model of integrated intervention for literacy and social-emotional skills development, relying on the use of high-quality authentic texts from contemporary children’s and adolescents’ literature. Our work intends to target teachers and teacher trainers, whose professional profile we will strengthen. Teachers of diverse disciplines (not just language and literature teachers) will develop their competences to implement disciplinary literacy in that students will use meaningful reading and writing learning activities and master these strategies using diverse authentic texts for young people, while learning the discipline. Simultaneously, students will enhance their social-emotional skills by learning to recognise and manage their emotions, establishing positive relationships and making responsible decisions. The European Literacy Policy Network recommends that all teachers receive effective initial teacher education and professional development in literacy teaching and learning in order to be well prepared for the tasks of making all Europeans able to read and write at a level that enables them to function and develop in society, at home, at school and at work, in order to achieve their aspirations as individuals, family members, workers and citizens. (ELINET, 2016). This recommendation calls for so-called disciplinary literacy approaches. Disciplinary literacy refers to the specifics of reading, writing, and communicating within a discipline, focusing on the ways of thinking, the skills, and the tools used by experts in the disciplines (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012). Each discipline has a specialized vocabulary and components unique to that discipline. Secondary students need to be taught therefore the “nuanced differences in producing knowledge via written language across multiple disciplines” (Moje, 2007, p. 9), which can be best achieved by using authentic (i.e. not school textbook) texts. With this in mind, our goal in the GROWE project is to promote literacy and emotional wellbeing for disadvantaged children’s and adolescents’ healthy growth by developing a model of integrated intervention to enhance literacy and social-emotional skills relying on authentic contemporary children’s and adolescents’ literature. Ultimately, our main objectives are to:- increase the partner organisations’ capacity to support teachers in developing their students’ literacy and social-emotional skills;- develop and test an in-service teacher training course in blended learning format to prepare teachers for addressing students’ literacy and social-emotional learning needs;- develop a toolkit (OER) with good practice to inspire teachers to adopt effective strategies for developing their students’ literacy and social-emotional skills.