By Sarah Pavey MSc FCLIP FRSA, Education Consultant SP4IL
In today’s highly interconnected world, cross-cultural cooperation has become vital for driving innovation and progress forward. An inspiring example of this is our BRIDGE project – a multilingual, multinational effort funded by the European Erasmus+ program (European Commission, 2024). This initiative aims to bolster information and digital literacy skills among elementary school students (aged 8-11) by providing teachers and librarians with a free resource. Through multicultural collaboration, the BRIDGE project strives to equip young learners with key competencies needed to thrive in an increasingly digital era.
The BRIDGE project united partners from Spain, Italy, Finland, Turkey, Greece, and England to contemplate the unique challenges of integrating information and digital literacy competencies across diverse nations. While exploring commonalities and differences in approach, our research paved the way for curating picture books and web resources featured on the now freely accessible BRIDGE portal (BRIDGE Partnership, 2024). But the initiative’s impacts stretched far beyond these materials. Through reciprocal sharing of perspectives, the cross-cultural exchange fostered invaluable connections amongst us all and by trading insights and beginning new relationships, we tapped into new territories of learning.
Positioning Information and Digital Literacy as Essentials in Education
The BRIDGE project centred its research on three objectives for encouraging information and digital literacy in the classroom. First, it prioritized integrating critical thinking, ethics, and equality across the elementary curriculum. This entailed promoting targeted in-class activities and underpinning the school librarian’s unique approach for nurturing these core competencies. Secondly, the project focused on enhancing reading motivation through contextualized print materials and digital documents tailored to young learners’ interests. Finally, BRIDGE examined each country’s approach to embedding information and digital literacy within all subjects. Equipped with these distinct goals, the initiative yielded developmental suggestions and practical classroom resources for empowering elementary students with literacy skills fundamental to lifelong learning.
Products for Elementary School Educators
The project produced three products:
- A detailed research report scrutinizing information and digital literacy policies in each country, with suggestions about how to strengthen connections.
- An online searchable portal with picture books and databases supporting competency development in information and digital literacy emphasizing equality and diversity.
- A training seminar and booklet of best practice, underpinned by sound pedagogy for utilising the resources within the portal.
All these products can be accessed via the BRIDGE website for full details.
Comparison of National Approaches to Information and Digital Literacy
By studying legislation and government policies in each country, BRIDGE revealed unique frameworks surrounding information and digital literacy in elementary education. While Spain relates this subject to overarching digital competence and Greece aims for comprehensive digital integration, Finland emphasizes transferable life skills. In Turkey, the curriculum incorporates information literacy to develop problem-solving abilities and manage information. Italy focusses on digital literacy as a priority competency. The curriculum and legislation in England mostly relates to tackling online threats. Nonetheless despite robust statutory requirements in many countries this did not always materialize in practice!
Some commonalities also appeared – several countries, including England, focus more on functional rather than critical information and digital literacy skills. However, some of Spain’s regional policies explicitly link information and digital literacy to critical aspects like analysis and ethics similarly to the approach in Turkey and Finland. Although specifics differ, improving teacher capabilities through better training emerged as a recurring priority amongst all participating countries.
Strategies to Enhance Engagement with Information and Digital Literacy
From this research the analysis enabled us to identify numerous ways for engaging elementary school students with information and digital literacy competencies involving both teachers and librarians but also highlighting the need for government legislative support and recognition:
- Teacher training and development
- Robust school libraries with specialized staff
- Cross-sector partnerships
- Policy reform and advocacy
- Tailored curricula, resources and practices
- Continuous evaluation
By implementing these internationally validated techniques schools could help drive information and digital literacy engagement. Use of the BRIDGE database can be a starting point on this journey.
The BRIDGE Portal: How Can it be Used?
This research also enabled us to create our open-access portal packed with multilingual picture books and digital materials supporting the BRIDGE project criteria. The content aligns with UN Sustainability Goals, making this a vital tool for global citizenship education too and underpinning diversity and inclusivity.
To use the resource, visit the website https://bridgeinfoliteracy.eu/portal/ and select from each relevant column the criteria for what you wish to find then search.
Figure 1 BRIDGE Portal home page
Figure 2 BRIDGE Portal results display
Figure 3 BRIDGE Portal detailed record view
Into the Future…
BRIDGE demonstrates the deep value of inclusive, borderless collaboration. So, we invite all elementary educators to explore this peer-reviewed portal and see information and digital literacy engagement thrive in your school. The BRIDGE team welcomes suggestions and your feedback can help us develop this tool which will be maintained by the EU (by the Spanish participants) for the next 10 years. Please feel free to comment via the BRIDGE website and enjoy using the database.
References
BRIDGE Partners (2024) Information and Digital Literacy at school. A bridge to support critical thinking and equality values for primary education using children’s literature and transmedia. Available at: https://bridgeinfoliteracy.eu/
European Commission (2024) Erasmus+: EU programme for education, training, youth and sport. Available at: https://erasmus-plus.ec.europa.eu/
Sarah Pavey is an education consultant based in Epsom in the UK. For over 20 years she worked as a school librarian before going freelance with her company SP4IL. Sarah has a first degree in Biochemistry, a Masters in Information Studies and holds fellowship of CILIP and the Royal Society of Arts. She is currently studying for a PhD by publication researching curriculum impact on the school library profession. She has published many books, most recently The Networked Librarian (Facet, 2024) and speaks regularly at conferences. Her training courses blend pedagogical theory with practice. The invitation to join the Erasmus team for the BRIDGE project contributed to her already extensive experience in working with schools internationally and it is hoped the same team will propose another project this Autumn. In her spare time she plays with a number of professional folk bands and calls for ceilidh dancing.