To: Utrecht Network – Summer School Task Force Proposal for the Second Edition of the Wetell Summer School

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To: Utrecht Network – Summer School Task Force Proposal for the second edition of the WeTell Summer School http://www.wetell.eu/summer-school/

Title and Theme: “WE TELL” - INNOVATING STORYTELLING TO ADDRESS CIVIC AWARENESS IN THE POST-DIGITAL AGE” – Second year (Focus on DISSENT) Promoted by the University of Bologna and the University of Valencia. Organizing Committee: Elena Lamberti, Francesco Benozzo, Luigi Contadini, Monica Notari, Francesco Vitucci (University of Bologna); Brigitte Jirku, Ana R., Ana Giménez, Carme Manuel, María José Coperías (University of Valencia). Supervisor and consultant: Tapio Varis (University of Helsinki) Location: Bologna, Italy

RATIONALE

The WeTell Summer School project has been conceived in the wake of UNESCO GCE guidelines/reports (2014, 2015), reflecting on a renewed role of Higher Education today. As per UNESCO, “The role of education is moving beyond the development of knowledge and cognitive skills to the building of values, soft skills and attitudes among learners. Education is expected to facilitate international cooperation and promote social transformation in an innovative way towards a more just, peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, secure and sustainable world.” (GCE, 2014/p.11). Consistently, the WE TELL Summer School focuses on the art and practice of STORYTELLING to promote civic and social engagement skills and attitudes among the so-called ‘Millennials’ – also known as Generation X or Echo Boomers.

In particular, WeTell Summer School focuses on the innovative approach of “PERFORMATIVE Storytelling” - a combination of modern and traditional methods of storytelling (from traditional forms of narratives to digital/multimedia storytelling), including and exploiting the potentialities of different media, such as digital technologies, visual arts, literature, cinema, music and daily objects.

A conscious use of Performative Storytelling turns the act of telling into a social practice. Social actions can be propelled by storytelling, as ‘we all tell stories’: storytelling builds the reality we experience and affects individual and collective consciousness. We are told stories every day, every minute of our lives; the point is that we can become better listeners of other people’s storytelling; we can also question the stories we are told;

4.iii - New Initiative - WeTell_Summer_School and, very important, we can also create our own storytelling. This Summer School equips the students with the necessary skills and competences to do so.

The Summer School is a creative, intercultural space where students are given the possibility to investigate and perform the act of storytelling in new and original ways, combining traditional and digital media, thus acquiring sound knowledge and skills of different modes and moods of communication.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Within this Summer School, the practice of Performative Storytelling is employed to:

 make students aware of the potentialities of storytelling as an empowering tool (civic awareness);  encourage them to listen to and engage with other people’s values and beliefs (inclusion & diversity);  discuss strategies to properly convey and channel their original ideas (intercultural and intermedia practices);  discuss strategies to detect poisonous storytelling, such as e.g. stereotypes, fake news, etc.(civic awareness).

Specifically, the main learning outcomes of the WE TELL Summer School for its participants are the following:

 to acquire a sound knowledge of the structures and rules of storytelling, both through traditional and digital media;  to understand how different forms of communication can affect the act of telling and the (cultural and informative) contents conveyed.  to be able to perform a successful and sustainable storytelling through traditional and digital media  to be able to tell "good" and "bad" storytelling apart  to be able to deal with social, technological and cultural complexity without fearing it;  to be able to detect and overcome demagogical and populist oversimplifications;  to create one’s own storytelling, based on one’s own values and beliefs in dialogue with those of the broader community.

WeTell Summer School on Performative Storytelling facilitates the acquisition of knowledge and skills which are more and more required by a variety of professions including:

 Healthcare and social services  Higher Education / Education  Social Services  Marketing and Communication  Media and advertising 2

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 General Management  Public Institutions  NGO, think tanks;  Public speeches, politics, diplomacy, sustainable policy-making;  Crisis and conflict management;  International and supranational organizations;  Local initiatives.

LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

The international character of the school and the academically heterogeneous composition of the student body creates the perfect environment for dialogue, discussion and confrontation. Key to this school is cooperative and collaborative learning, as it accustoms us to otherness, to the physical and intellectual presence of others; most important, it accustoms us to the diversity of thought, to share and develop practices of inclusion.

In addition, this Summer School is conceived as a place for dialogue among students and professors, as the latter are invited to be as active as the former. Together, teachers and students represent a variety of generations who can learn from each other how to develop new forms of performative storytelling bridging the existing technological and cultural divide.

TARGET GROUPS The We Tell Summer School gathers students from a variety of areas of studies within the involved Higher Education institutions and Utrecht Network to create a learning community that is representative of different university curricula (which, in fact, means, different teaching pedagogies, tools, environments). We therefore welcome students in: • Literary studies • ICT • Arts and Performing Arts • Education • Graphic Design/Architecture • History • Languages and Linguistics • Media/Communication • Cultural Studies

We are targeting mainly students in their first and second cycle of study, even though the School accepts also students in their third cycle.

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TEACHING THEMES (Selection) Each year, the teaching themes are selected and defined by the teaching staff based on the school mandate and the annually chosen focus. In detail:  The 2018 edition focus was on Storytelling, Civic Awareness and RESPONSIBILITY.  The 2019 edition focus is on Storytelling, Civic Awareness and DISSENT.  The 2020 edition focus will be on Storytelling, Civic Awareness and VULNERABILITY. The focus of the later editions will be confirmed by the end of the third edition.

The above mentioned focuses are approached through a series of theories and practices of storytelling, including:  Typology of storytelling: oral, written, digital forms.  Media as environments: invisible pervasiveness of ‘friendly’ forms/technologies of communication.  Form of communication/form of societies (Global citizenship)  Storytelling and intercultural practices  Inter-generational dialogue  Performative Storytelling applied to social troubleshooting/problem-solving  Technological divide & multicultural societies

TEACHING TEAM The core teaching team originates from a strategic partnership between the University of Bologna and the University of Valencia but is open to scholars and professionals from other member institutions within the Utrecht Network to encourage a fertile dialogue between partners, and promoting collaboration from different perspectives.

For the second edition of the School, we will therefore issue a call among the UN partner institution targeting colleagues so to achieve a double goal: to have more colleagues involved from within UN; to increase the number of students from the UN.

The teaching team will include scholars and professionals who are experts in the following areas:  Theories on/of Storytelling across media (literature; visual arts; digital environments; film studies; etc.)  Media Literacy and Media Ecology  Art and Performing Arts  Graphic Design /Architecture  Languages, Linguistics  Cultures, Citizenship and Human Rights  Education, Pedagogy, Inter-cultural practices 4

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 Collaborative creative design practice applied to civic engagement  Knowledge of crowdsensing technologies applied to civic participation and social engagement  Inter-art and design practices

TEACHING METHODOLOGY Students are the protagonists and the actors, in that they are invited to engage through Performative Storytelling. They have the chance to funnel their thoughts and projects into something concrete, real, but always keeping in mind the otherness and the other generations. Our Summer School includes counselling to facilitate such a dialogue (to support daily debriefing and develop, when needed customized learning paths). The model that we follow combines traditional lectures/plenary, blended/self-learning in situ, individual and collaborative operative tasks. A typical day is structured as follows:  Plenary lecture (on issues as diverse as: performative storytelling theories/practices/methodology; Global Citizens Education as Horizontal Knowledge; practices of social inclusion, intercultural strategies; ICT and crowdsensing technologies applied to civic engagement; EU programs encouraging and supporting social engagement and active citizenships; etc.) – 60 minutes  Assisted Self-learning – 90 minutes  Work in groups to apply performative storytelling to selected case studies – 180 minutes (in synergy with diverse institutions and organizations)*  Individual feedback (various media forms) – 30 minutes  Debriefing (plenary) – 30-60 minutes * Some examples:  Have public debates, on the model of a town-hall meeting [on local and global issues related to practices of inclusion, civic engagement, etc.] where students are asked to detect and solve problem(s). The presence of others is again a reprimand to take into account everyone's needs, backgrounds, etc.  Think tank to experiment new patterns for social troubleshooting and problem solving, outside traditional main stream models. Global citizens can and must never act alone, which means within their ethnic, cultural community.

The WE TELL Summer School takes advantage from a series of local events/institutions focused on storytelling as a social practice (from Museums, to Communities of Practices in the field of social inclusion, to cultural festivals, etc.) and is partner with a variety of subjects (including: EU Project PERFORMIGRATIONS: People Are the Territory; ARCHI Cultural Association; etc.). The idea of ‘city as classroom’, a tenet in the inclusive field of Media Ecology, is therefore pursued as a horizontal educational training to create awareness of civic experiences connecting theory and practice. Grading/Credits: the School grading system complies with the Erasmus policies; the summer school confers 6 ECTS.

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PUBLIC OUTPUTS

 Teaching materials offered in a variety of forms (i.e. ted talks format, white papers, blogs, etc.) to be used for blended e-learning classes.  Online platform hosting a web-based community of practice to disseminate the innovative idea of Performative Storytelling as a social empowering tool - Throughout the three years and beyond, this platform will form a database of ideas allowing for an analysis of how students react to external stimuli.  In addition to the above, the underpinning goal is to create a trans-national community of students and teachers actively interested in the potentialities that performative storytelling has for Global Citizenship Education. We think that the help and commitments of the students is crucial for all future sustainability plans, as well as to support civically engaged horizontal skills within Higher Education and, in turn, within a broader society.

SUSTAINABILITY This summer school is conceived as part of a broader project co-sponsored by the University of Bologna and dedicated to the development of new horizontal knowledge and skills within Higher Education programs. It is called WeTell – Storytelling and Civic Engagement and explores/test the idea of Performative Storytelling as a strategy to foster civic engagement and practices of inclusion. This grant helps to support and confirm the organization of the summer school for a minimum period of three years period. In fact, this Summer School is considered as a strategic component of the broader project, as it enables to include and empower students while developing new educational strategies for global citizenship.

Timeline  November/December 2018: Confirmation of the teaching staff and first outline of the summer school 2019 workplan;  December 2018 – May 2019: Implementation of the Summer School educational offer;  December 2018: start of the promotional activities to launch the school (website, logo, meetings, dissemination events, customized mailing lists/newsletters; etc.);  April 2019: deadline for students enrolment;  July 1-12 2019: second edition of the Summer School. Location: Bologna, Italy.

Communication Plan Communication & promotion activities follows throughout the entire duration of the school; they target specific audiences and are developed in synch with the project activities work plan. All communication activities are shared with the network partners and other external institutions that may be relevant to ensuring all necessary visibility and diffusion. Communication & promotion develops along the following steps: 6

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1. 1 December 2018: Release of 10 video-clips promoting the second edition of WeTell Summer School. 2. December 2018 – end of the school: online dissemination on  institutional websites;  independent/direct/specific websites, such as www.performigrations.eu, www.canadausa.it, www.archi.bo.it;  social networks and blogs;  newsletters (Utrecht Network Newsletter, etc.);  other academic/institutional channels available outside the network; 3. December 2018 – February 2019: dissemination as printed posters/leaflets; 4. June 2019: new gadgets and stationery with the logo of the summer school.

Bologna, October 18th 2018

Elena Lamberti North-American Studies, University of Bologna