EDUCATION – UMinho leads European project to combat lack of reading habits

A European consortium led by the University of Minho (UMinho), which brings together ten academies, will develop, for three years, a project that aims to combat the lack of reading habits, the institution announced.

According to professor Maria Jesus Cabral, from UMinho’s School of Letters, Arts and Human Sciences, the project will culminate in the creation of a digital platform that will host an anthology of texts read aloud in the various languages ​​of origin of the participating universities.

“The anthology will have 100 texts that will be chosen by the researchers of this project and also by the students, who will play a very active role”, he said.

This is the project “Lirensemble – Reading Communities, Shaping Identities” (“Reading together – reading communities, forming identities”, in free translation), which is co-financed with 250 thousand euros by the Erasmus+ program and which brings together universities in Portugal , Spain, Belgium, Czechia, Hungary, France and Italy.

“We strongly believe in the importance of reading as an antidote to misinformation and lack of literacy”, added Maria Jesus Cabral.

According to this researcher, the idea is, from the outset, to ask the community how they read today and create spaces for communities of readers.

Thus, the project has three dimensions: a research dimension, an advanced training dimension and another embodied in the digital platform.

Every year there will be a colloquium at one of the partner universities, in which the project’s teachers, professors and researchers, doctoral candidates and young researchers will participate.

“We have a week-long intensive program with just students, two from each partner university, who will discover, work on or decline this notion of an interpretive community”, explained Maria Jesus Cabral.

Students will try to understand, in particular, how we read today and what are the major challenges facing European citizens in cultural, intercultural and identity terms.

“The main objective is to launch the platform, publish publications and also create a website specifically for the project”, summarized Maria Jesus Cabral.

The project brings together the universities of Minho and Porto (Portugal), Antwerp (Belgium), Cádiz and Valencia (Spain), Masarykova (Czech), Pazmany Peter (Hungary), Paris-Nanterre and Paris 3 (France) and Roma Sapienza ( Italy).