West Pride and LGBTQ literature

Have you seen many rainbow flags set up this week? The rainbow is a symbol of everyone’s right to be just as they are and to love who they want.

On June 12-16th The West Pride festival is going on in Gothenburg and the region, Västra Götaland. The festival is an art and culture festival, aiming to serve as a secure meeting place for LGBTQ people. Here you can check what the word  LGBTQ means, and take a look at the program for the festival taking place at for example the Gothenburg Art Musem, the Gothenburg City library and the Gothenburg University (Artisten).

The aim is to highlight LGBTQ people’s life situation, spread knowledge, change attitudes, invite to conversations, reflections. In this way, a more open social climate can be created, and prejudices ans discrimination based on gender identity / sexual orientation / gender expression be counteracted,. The festival is free for visitors.

The ISGR library wants to work the same way as the festival. To be inclusive and there for everyone in the ISGR community, enabling in many different ways and secure a welcoming and respectful approach and good study environment.  The library thinks that everyone benefits from a work on equal treatment and human rights.

Therefore, we got a LGBTQ shelf in the library. Here are tips of some literature bringing up LGBTQ (homosexuals, bisexuals, transgender people, people with queer expressions and identities and more). Here you can check what a norm and what norm critical pedagogy means.

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Voting, Summer Reading Challenges and Crafts

Now there is time to vote for what artists you would like to meet, during the upcoming school year, within the Creative School project, supported by the National Arts Council.

Grades 6-8 are welcome to do so in the library,  in connection with the return of books, until the end of the school year. Creative School is a democratic project, emphasizing student democracy, so therefore voting is an important part of the process. And in this way, you influence what will happen.

The library has also put together a Summer Reading Challenges booklet, with three activities for those who want:

• Reading bingo

• Harry Potter quiz

• 4 book reports

If you do the activities, (reading four books and filling in book reports for those is the most important), you will get a book for free from the library at the end of summer, when you hand in the Summer Reading Challenges booklet to Elin, your librarian.

There are also crosswords, book mark workshop, and other crafts available in the library from today and onwards.

Bart Moeyaert. The ALMA prize winner 2019

This week is the ALMA week in Sweden. (By ALMA means Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. The ALMA prize was founded by the Swedish government in 2002 and is the world’s largest children’s and youth literature prize. The prize money is five million Swedish kronor.)

During the ALMA week the prize awarded author of 2019, the Belgian author Bart Moeyaert, gives public lectures, meet with students, visit Astrid Lindgren’s childhood home and participate at an award ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall on May 27, where the Crown Princess Victoria will present Moeyaert.

Bart started to write, because he thought “writing was safer than talking”.

Here you can see an interview with Bart, shortly after the prize was handed out:

Here you can also visit Bart’s website: https://www.bartmoeyaert.com/international.php

The interactive live webcast with Veronica Roth

The interactive live webcast with Veronica Roth took place on Friday evening in the ISGR Library. 11 students, 4 teachers and the librarian who set this up, Elin, were present.

She wrote the Divergent Movie series which also inspired the books of the same name.

But her goal was to speak about Creative People and ways to come up with creative ideas.

And of course there are those of us who wake up with ideas, are struck with ideas, or dream ideas; she names practical strategies for this process.

In a nutshell, be curious and notice what you are interested in. You can take notes for example and build your own library.  In this way you will be able to use the information as a base to combine, inspire or spin off parts to your own formation. Where do ideas come from if they are not somewhere from the start?

Examples were given based on the original experienced source and the chosen combination of several ideas to be applied to an idea of your own. Basically, giving known stories other endings, seeing from other character’s points of view or setting two seemingly unrelated parts together is all  for the goal of forming new ideas. Or put two completely unrelated ideas together which form a completely different idea.

Lastly, when it comes to creativity and working a life career, time is irrelevant. Written works may be started or finished or supply ideas for new inspiration. Working with the creative process means that new ideas come from new sources.

Ideas just don’t come from anywhere. If you can build a system or become more aware of what you like, you can lay the foundation for the availability of ideas to work for you on a regular basis.

Susan Kohansall

ISGR

Drama Teacher

May 14^th ,2019

Veroncia Roth. Event coming up this Friday

Please feel free to join:

A live webcast with the much loved and very famous science fiction / dystopia author Veronica Roth.

              Veronica Roth photo credit Reinaldo Coddou.

When? Friday evening at 19.45-20.45

Where? ISGR library, 4th floor

For whom? Middle grade students, no matter what grade.High school students can sign up too, since there will probably be spots left. There is a total of 30 spots.

How? Pop by the ISGR library and talk to Elin

Event description: During the live webcast, Veronica Roth will return to her middle school Alma mater. You will have the chance to ask questions and she will:“To talk with current students about her path to becoming a published author, the process of active brainstorming, and how to tap into the creativity within us all”.

The event is supported by the School Library Journal and HarperCollins Children’s Books.

Veronica Roth has written the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Divergent Series (Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant, and Four: A Divergent Collection) and the Carve the Mark series (Carve the Mark, The Fates Divide).

This is a fantastic opportunity that will probably not come back.

Exhibition in the library. Minority languages & book covers

In the library there is a combined exhibition going on at the moment.

MYP8 students, studying Advanced Swedish, are displaying posters on the five minority languages in Sweden: Jiddish, Romani, Meänkieli, Finnish and Sami.

There are minority languages on a historically basis. That is why those who use these languages have been given special rights. For example, people should be able to use Finnish, Meänkieli and Sami in contact with Swedish authorities, in certain municipalities that have a large proportion of Sami, Meänkieli or Finnish speakers.

On January 1st 2019, the law was revised, so that rights and obligations are further strengthened. Swedish sign language also got a special position.

MYP6 students have been creating new book covers for existing youth novels. The students have also written texts for the back cover, information about the author and some have even added tips on further reading. Try and see if you can guess what books the covers are about!

The teachers for both projects has been Margareta H.

World Book and Copyright Day 2019

This day falls on April 23, every year. This year, UN focuses on indigenous languages. With indigenous means originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native. Indigenous language is spoken within an ethnic community where the language is part of their identity and some of their customs are preserved through it.

According to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, 40 percent of about 6700 languages ​​in the world are about to disappear. Since languages ​​are not isolated phenomena, but express values ​​and cultures, other things also run the risk of disappearing: history, traditions and knowledge that may have been preserved for about a thousand years.
This in turn means less diversity, peace and development. That makes indigenous peoples and their languages ​​extra important to protect, advocate for and preserve their rights. Also because they are often subject to geographical, political and social isolation.
Indigenous peoples are also affected by climate change. The environments that they maintain contain great biodiversity, because of how they care about it.
But the peoples are increasingly exposed to assaults by multinational companies and governments, who want to engage in extractive industries such as mining, oil exploration and agro-industrial projects.
In the library we therefore displaying books this week with books about indigenous languages, indigenous peoples, tribal peoples, first peoples, native peoples.
Here are some examples of indigenous peoples. (Note that there exist about 5000 indigenous groups though in about 90 countries.):
• Inuit of the Arctic,
• The White Mountain Apache of Arizona,
• the Yanomami and the Tupi People of the Amazon,
• The Maasai in East Africa
• Bontoc people of the mountainous region of the Philippines.