The Nordplus Horisontal project brings together a range of oral history and life writing centres, archives and scholars from the Baltic and Nordic countries: Estonian Literary Museum, Archives of Cultural History (coordinator), Association of Latvian Oral History Researchers “Life-Story”, Finnish Literature Society, Literary Archives, Joensuu Oral History Archive/University of Jyvaskyla, Department of History of Stockholm University and the Gender Studies Center of Vilnius University. The aim of the project is utilizing various life story, oral history, photographic and audio/visual resources to highlight family history as an important agent and facilitator of social and historical change. A focus on family history makes possible a learning process that while anchored in the individual(s) involved can contribute to the awareness and knowledge of a number of key issues that are both a legacy of the past and a quality of the present.
The current project places such process into a comparative Baltic and Nordic framework that creates a platform for the exposure of wider intercultural and interregional concerns. The project facilitates grass-root level gathering of family histories and their interpretation, through this supporting multiple processes of learning in everyday contexts as well as the relationship of the individual to society in varied generational and cultural contexts, including those of the wider comparative contexts highlighted by the project.
The main outcome of the project is a digital learning and teaching resource that contains modules by all participating institutions. The resource is created as a result of in-depth discussion of life story resources, research and pedagogical traditions based on these resources, pooling the know-how and experience of different partners and gearing the resource to serve different educational purposes (higher education, including research education, adult education, museum education) as well as their integration.
By the end of the project, each module will constitute a complete teaching resource that can be applied in different educational institutions in the Baltic and Nordic countries. In the presentation, the draft version of the resource that will be completed by the end of 2014 will be presented for the very first time.