The STORYLINE project aims to empower young people for youth work innovation in the field of storytelling and language learning/teaching, and to promote social inclusion and cohesion through an intercultural, inclusive, and intergenerational approach. Although storytelling originally emerged as a way to transmit cultural heritage and other teachings, this project uses this concept as a bridge between young people and the elderly.

The project facilitates dialogue between locals and expatriates, between young and elderly communities, with the aim of drawing attention to the importance of community cooperation for achieving social prosperity.

Each country will organize one training session for young workers. Upon the return of the young workers to their countries, they will organize a local workshop for young people on storytelling. The 20 young people, along with experts, will interview elderly and disadvantaged individuals from their community about their stories (about their lives, their city, curiosities from their past, their cultural heritage, etc.).

The stories will be selected, edited, and adapted into different levels of reading material for young learners. The young people will also be involved in the editing and translation process of adapting the stories. The adapted stories will be compiled in the StorytellingHUB – a platform for language learning and in an eBook. The eBook will also include best practices in language learning developed during the training sessions for young workers.

Out of the 63 stories available on the HUB, 12 of them will be transformed into "escape rooms" in Virtual Reality. This game will be titled "EscapeStory Sphere" and will be an interactive language learning game that promotes cultural heritage and storytelling as a way to learn about a language and culture. The game will be available for free, online, and can be used with or without virtual reality glasses, through a computer, mobile phone, or tablet.

Objectives

The main objective of the project is to encourage intercultural and intergenerational connections and to promote cultural heritage and exchanges through storytelling and language learning.

Research team

• Ana Cunha (Principal Investigator)
• Anabela Mateus
• Lucimar Dantas

Partners

The project brings together 5 entities from 3 European Union countries:

• HEI- House of Education and Innovation (Romania)
• University of Granada (Spain)
• Phoart Production S.R.L. (Romania)
• Didark. Didactics of Art and Archaeology S.L. (Spain)
• Lusófona University (Portugal)