Digital Literacy Project

The Atwater Library is pleased to present Pluralism: Tell it; See it; Hear it, a youth digital literacy video project funded by the Inspirit Foundation. The Library believes in promoting cultural, educational and social programs for the diverse Montreal city and celebrates 186 years of service as a thriving community hub.

Pluralism: Tell it; See it; Hear it is the second project to have been funded by the Inspirit Foundation.The idea for this project emerged from the Inspirit-funded Human Library project when youth participants indicated a yearning for more contact and spiritual dialogue with youth from diverse communities.

Pluralism: Tell it; See it; Hear it is collaborating with youth who will probe pluralism through discussions of pluralism and synergistic creation of video vignettes of individuals in our partner groups. The team will show and discuss the videos in several venues while engaging the community in discussing and appreciating pluralism, culminating in a well-publicized screening for a large audience.

Our team comprises of representatives of Montreal-area religious, spiritual and secular partner groups to probe and create wider awareness of pluralism. Our partners will assist the Youth Team in conducting the project — researching pluralism, planning and filming interviews and showing the videos with moderated discussion.

We aim to encourage young adults to increase their understanding of the plurality of spiritual, religious and secular beliefs in their communities. This project will support collaborations between young adults of different backgrounds and beliefs, and between different spiritual, religious and secular organizations.

With funding from the federal government’s New Horizons for Seniors program, the Literacy Project of Atwater Library and Computer Centre is offering a series of workshops aimed at empowering musically oriented seniors to use and later teach others to use computers to record and create music. This will be followed by workshops offered by the participants themselves.

The workshops are facilitated by Eric Craven and Peter Shaw, a student in theatre at Concordia University, with the collaboration of Line Grenier, a professor in Communication studies at Université de Montréal.

We started with series of information sessions to better understand how to work with the participants in November and December so that when we began our workshops in January we could zero in on their interests and abilities.

The participants have covered the basic of the gear, how to use basic audio recording and editing software and have begun their projects.

Their projects range from vocal ensemble pieces of popular music to field recording based soundscapes. We are currently working on developing these pieces to utilise more digital options such as looping, effects and other sound transformations.

We just wrapped up another great collaboration with Concordia University’s Theatre and Development program. During the fall 2013 semester, students in a course called “The Neighbourhood Theatre” learned how be artists in residence at the Library, assisted with Digital Literacy Project programming and developed a forum theatre workshop aimed at improving job interview skills for clients of the Little Burgundy Employment Centre and Jeunes en action at the Carrefour Jeunesse Emploi – NDG.

The students wrapped up the course by making a video about their experiences with the Library.

Kids POP is the kid-focused part of POP Montreal. On September 28, 2013, the Digital Literary Project gave a free workshop “Record Yourself!”  at Espace POP.

We designed a workshop that helped the participants gain skills and confidence with digital recording tools in a fun environment.

For this workshop, our team included Zsofia Zambo a community educator and local musician, Peter Shaw a theatre educator, and Eric Craven the Digital Literacy Project Coordinator and local drummer. We also had some amazing  volunteers from Concordia’s  Theatre and Development program.

On Friday September 20, 2013, we hosted a reception for Concordia University’s Ageing-Communication-Media (ACM) research group.  The reception launched a weekend of meetings in Montreal for all the international partners included in an upcoming SSHRC Partnership Grant.

Last year, we collaborated with the ACM on the Exhibition “MemorySpace: private memories, public histories”

Here are some pictures of the reception shot by Edward McCann: