Project Description
Narrative skills are the ability to describe things and events and tell stories. They are basic skills and key-competences, which are essential for
- literacy (i.e. the ability to read and write),
- first and second language learning and
- certainly also for active citizenship and participation in democracy (roughly: being able to make oneself heard).
They are also crucial for effective and engaging communication in any disciplinary field.
Methods like conventional story telling (based on books), reading books aloud, power point presentations of picture books (story book theatres), kamishibai, dramatizing book contents, puppet or shadow plays can all contribute to raising narrative skills, but their educational value remains to be analysed.
Not all children books and not all topics are equally suitable for conveying narrative skills. Establishing an audited list of felicity conditions for teaching and learning narrative skills (esp. appropriate material, contents and methods) is one of the envisaged outputs of our project “Aqua Narrabilis”.
In the next two years, we will develop:
- practical methods, o hands-on and tangible material (e.g. texts for puppet or shadow plays)
- didactic models and
- easily accessible and up-to-date open educational resources (OER) in diverse European languages for the use in library work, in primary schools (age group: 6 – 12 years) and in kindergartens (3 – 6 years).
In order to address issues of active citizenship and worldwide concern and to produce comparable material that can be used in all European countries (and beyond), we concentrate on the topic of WATER, i.e. all stories , all material and resources are related to water and its ecological, nutritional, geographical and – above all – symbolic value
