Workshops in Romania
Workshops in Romania

New Themes, New Target Group for “Let’s Culture Together”

Throughout their Tandem Europe partnership, Cristiana Olteanu and Pierluigi Vaccaneo have worked on Let's Culture Together, in which they combine literature and technology to engage with readers. In this new step of their project, and with the help of a grant, they have turned their focus on readers with specific needs. They tell us more about their method in this update.

An Incubation grant has allowed us to develop our project Let’s Culture Together with more creative reading activities, online and offline, adding new themes and new target groups. We have therefore focused the next steps of our project on the social issues of people with autism and dyslexia.

We have selected and proposed reading fragments from the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, and we have divided the activities into two sections: a Creative Reading Workshop and a Read and Tell Workshop.

Workshop in Romania
Workshop in Romania

1. Creative Reading Workshop

We have gathered 112 students online and offline and split the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time into 22 chapters and set a calendar for meeting with readers in Romania, every two days between 3 May and 21 June 2017.

We have also set a reading calendar of the book using Betwyll, the social reading app developed by our Italian partner Associazione Culturale Twitteratura, which we used for the entire project.

The Creative Reading Workshops consisted of:
– Reading the fragment
– Dramatisation
– Empathy games
– Communication on paper, reproducing Twyll messages: sharing of impressions, ideas, questions and debates
– Draw and illustrate all created Twyller

2. Read and Tell Workshop

Between 26 June and 14 July, we have organised workshops – 4 days per week and 2 hour per day during 3 weeks, with 99 students.

Children between the ages of 9 and 17 who had joined the Creative Reading Workshops collected all the twylls (produced online and offline) and made postcards. They sent them to youngsters of the same age from 21 libraries in Romania in addition to three libraries in the world: Cumberland (USA), Genk (Belgium) and Gateshead (UK).

In total, over 1.000 postcards have been sent, and the correspondence between the youngsters continues.

We will continue this work from September on with another book.