School, work and our cultural heritage

The project involves the students of high schools of Avezzano, a small town in Abruzzo, in the use of the hours to be devoted compulsory to school-work alternation for reorganizating, digitazing, cataloging and sharing of library materials stored in school libraries, with special attention to the substantial patrimony of texts in the Abruzzese dialect or written by little known authors from Abruzzo that can be collected and made available to all the schools interested in the project. Even at a great distance, the children of emigrants abroad or young people leaving our country will have access to the collection, rediscovering or keeping alive the contact with their roots. There is currently no online material of any kind that collects works related to the territory. A network will be created between these schools and the material collected will converge, through agreements with foreign partners, also in the school collections of EU cities where there are some important communities coming from Abruzzo. Foreign students of each school will be asked to bring 5 books of their choice among those in their possession, coming from their places of origin and in language. The texts collected will become part of the digitized library heritage of the school, constituting the first nucleus of an ever-expanding, multi-ethnic and multilingual collection that eliminates barriers and fosters knowledge of the other and integration. The participating schools commit themselves to make use of these texts, providing for the study or discussion of at least one of them in the annual programs and occasionally opening the doors to external visitors, planning debates on migrant literatures and narrations of their experiences. At the same time, the experience of the Abruzzo communities residing abroad involved in the project will be investigated through questionnaires, and will be compared with those of today's migrant flows and their families.